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TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas school boards would have the power to tell teachers who are not members of unions to "take it or leave it" in salary negotiations under a bill endorsed by a state House panel Friday.
The bill would allow individual teachers who are not members of the associations in the normal collective bargaining structure to negotiate for themselves, but school boards would be able to refuse any counter-offers from nonmembers and would not be required to include them in deals bargained with the unions.
Republican Rep. Marvin Kleeb of Overland Park, who is on the House Commerce, Labor and Economic Development Committee that approved the bill, said the bill would be beneficial to the state's best teachers, because they could negotiate more effectively for better benefits based on their specific attributes.
He said it would be "impractical and unrealistic" for the school boards to play hard ball with the independent teachers in negotiations.
"There's a supply and demand aspect to teachers, just like there's a supply and demand aspect to professionals within our own businesses," Kleeb said.
But Mark Desetti, a lobbyist for the Kansas National Education Association, the state's largest teacher's union, called it a "terribly messy anti-teacher bill" designed to break up the unions.
The bill is one of several measures before the Legislature this session that would modify the current collective bargaining arrangement between school boards and their employees. One bill, which has passed through committee to the House floor, would reduce the total number of issues school boards and education teachers' unions would have to negotiate each year from 31 to just salary and work hours.
Another bill before committees in both chambers reflects a compromise reached by the state's largest associations of school boards, administrators, superintendents, and teachers in January. It would allow each side to bring five issues to the negotiating table in addition to salary. The associations have said they will not support any measure other than the compromise bills.
Democratic Sen. and Minority Leader Anthony Hensley said Republican legislators have been ignoring the compromise in the hopes of driving a wedge between the school boards and teachers at a time that the state has been forced to trim education spending.
"I think this is an effort to try and divide and conquer the education community," Hensley said.
Republican Gov. Sam Brownback has said that he would cut nearly $28 million from the current budget for public schools on March 7 if the Legislature could not find alternative savings.
Brownback has also directed legislators to repeal the current school funding formula and replace it with block grants to individual school districts after a panel of district judges ruled the state should be spending at least $548 million more on schools according to the formula.
"If what they want to do is get us fighting each other so that they can cut schools more, it's not going to work, we are not splitting up," Desetti said.
Kleeb said he was unfamiliar with compromise, and defended the bill as bringing more competition to the education labor market.
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