This story was updated Friday at 1 p.m. with more detail.
The union representing over 2,000 teachers in the Salem-Keizer School District declared an impasse in bargaining Thursday evening. They said negotiations with school district leaders were stalled after almost two months of meeting with a state mediator.
The decision is the first step toward a teacher strike, which would be the first in district history. But a strike, if it comes, would be at least a month away under timelines set out in state law.
Salem-Keizer Education Association leaders declared an impasse around 6 p.m. Thursday after a day of mediation. The district and union have been bargaining a new contract since the spring of 2023 and began mediation in December.
“The decision to move SKEA in the direction of a potential strike was not entered into lightly,” the union said in a statement.
Union leaders say they’re stuck on two key issues: class size and workload definitions.
Superintendent Andrea Castañeda said pay remains a factor, since the union has not agreed to the district’s offer of a 9% raise over two years, with $5,000 retention bonuses. She disagreed with the union’s decision to declare impasse.
“We were still making so much progress. Even through the moments before the declaration of impasse, we were still exchanging articles and reaching agreement,” Superintendent Andrea Castañeda said in a Friday news conference.
The union has pushed for more action to reduce class sizes and caseloads for educators, including spelling out targets in their contract and extra pay for teachers with larger classes.
District leaders have countered by suggesting a committee structure to review student-teacher ratios in elementary schools and make recommendations including reassigning educators giving teachers with larger classes additional prep time.
“We understand the budgetary constraints. I think we’ve honored that really well by scaling back and being creative with some of our proposals,” union president Tyler Scialo-Lakeberg said. In a statement, the union said the district’s proposal brings classroom teachers into conversations about class size, but without identifying targets or taking action toward reductions.
District leaders say they can’t meaningfully reduce class sizes when they’re working to close a projected budget deficit for the next school year, a process that will require laying off hundreds of educators.
Castañeda said hitting the class size targets in a recent union proposal would require hiring about 100 additional teachers just to cover elementary school and special education. That would come at a cost of about $10 million a year including wages and benefits.
“In the face of having to cut over $30 million from our budget, we cannot add $10 million in staffing,” she said in a news conference Friday morning, reiterating that the union’s demand was “mathematically impossible.”
The employee workload concerns include the length of the workday and how teachers are paid if they “sell” their preparation period, effectively working more than full-time for additional money. The issue became a flashpoint during the Covid pandemic, when teachers taught a mix of in-person and online classes and the district changed its methods of calculating workload in the face of drastically different schedules.
In 2022, a judge found the district had committed an unfair labor practice by changing its workload calculations and ordered back pay for teachers affected by the change.
The union wants teachers’ workload defined by how many classes they teach, since each additional class requires more time to plan lessons and grade papers — work that often happens on evenings and weekends.
The district wants workload calculated based on the hours a teacher is required to be present at school, a method Castañeda said makes standardizing pay easier.
“It’s basically a way that they can make us do the same amount of work for less pay,” Scialo-Lakeberg said.
Castañeda said Friday she was hopeful resolution could still be reached on the issue.
“The definition of a full time employee has become unnecessarily technical and complex. And both parties are participants in that,” she said.
Following an impasse declaration, state law requires both sides submit their final best offers to a state mediator within a week. Then, there’s a 30-day cooling off period. After 30 days, the district can impose its best offers, and teachers can go on strike.
That would mean the earliest possible teacher strike date would be after students return from spring break on April 1.
Union leaders have called a member meeting Tuesday to assess teacher support for a strike.
Castañeda said in the event of a strike, schools would close and the district would not provide child care. She said the district would work to provide meals for students when schools are closed.
The district is also in mediation with its classified employee union, which represents bus drivers, school cafeteria workers, custodians, classroom assistants and other support workers. Castañeda on Friday said those negotiations are making progress.
Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
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Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers city news, education, nonprofits and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for a decade. Outside of work, she’s a skater and board member with Salem’s Cherry City Roller Derby and can often be found with her nose buried in a book.
