Members of your Unit 3 bargaining team met for the second time with the Office of Correctional Education (OCE) on January 14, 2025, regarding the proposed academic calendar for 2025-2026.
The dates within the proposed calendar itself were not in dispute, as the time off in the calendar already came from consensus built by teachers and administrators. This consensus was made possible by new language that we secured in our 2023 contract. As a result, our conversations with OCE didn’t focus on the specific dates on the academic calendar, instead focusing on creating a calendar that included as much actionable scheduling information as possible.
OCE leadership has the unilateral right to distribute the calendar, and it was shared with staff in early January. After distribution we continued to engage with OCE in an effort to get common principles and information that existed previously incorporated back into the calendar moving forward.
In this meeting we were able to secure an agreement for OCE to clearly notate the first day of each academic year, as well as a clear reference back to article 21.25.3 of our MOU when distributing information about instructional assignments. Unfortunately, OCE was not amenable to including concrete information regarding when each academic quarter ends as it is OCE’s position that they do not have formal quarters within the academic year with grading periods and progress report timelines being set by each individual site principal.
While we were not able to make all of the calendar improvements that we had hoped for, we are pleased to see incremental improvements and change to the calendar that will provide clearer information for our Unit 3 teachers to rely on, and open the door for additional improvements moving forward. Numerous sections of our MOU rely on the academic calendar, and we are consistently working towards a goal of having an academic calendar that is an effective tool.
We thank the numerous member leaders that were involved in crafting this calendar, and want to especially extend our gratitude to John Richards who worked tirelessly on this project prior to, and in the leadup to, his recent retirement. We appreciate your hard work!
For any questions or concerns, contact your bargaining unit leaders at [email protected].