Collective Bargaining July6th

The guest speaker from the IFT (Tom) was interesting to listen to but not all that informative. His partner (Chris) works in my building as my head teacher and thus I have heard the union jargon many times. I found it intersting that he did his best to avoid answering senitive questions concerning union positions on the unfunded liabilities in the pension funds. The answer was really more of a finger pointing at the state government officials stating what their retirement requirements consisted of. It is worthy of note that he did state that the unions were somewhat responsible for the problem by the demands that have been requested that were not financially sound. We then worked on the mock negotiations and my team was the board side. I found it challenging to tackle in that the volume of work was so overwhelming. I get frustrated in that this is a mock situation and some of the information was incorrect or not available. I prefer to have all the information prior to but that is not possible in this case. We prioritized what we thought were most pertinent to us as a board. That was intersting to see what the others in the group felt were important.