DAE Asks Durham School Board to Delay Budget Vote, Announces “Practice Pickets”

In the aftermath of last week’s surprise board of education vote to approve a meet and confer policy, the Durham Association of Educators (DAE) sat down with board members Jessica Carda-Auten, Joy Harrell Goff, and Bettina Umstead on Monday night to work through the DAE’s nine biggest priorities in this year’s ongoing budget discussions.

But all three board members shot down DAE president Mika Twietmeyer’s biggest ask: “Will you commit to not voting on the budget until we all have this transparency, and especially information about the frontline positions and the fund balance?”

It was the first meeting between DAE and school board members since the board abruptly voted on April 10 to adopt a meet and confer policy. While the approved policy—the first of its kind in the state—gave DAE much of what it had been pushing for for more than a year—it contained one major difference from the education association’s preferred version: the percentage of employees a group must represent to get a seat at the table for district decisions.

Even Harrell Goff, who was the most vocal supporter of the union’s version of the meet and confer agreement, said that she wouldn’t commit to potentially holding up the chain of municipal budget planning. The school board is set to vote April 27 on a budget request to send to the county commission, which will finalize a county-wide budget in June (Durham Public Schools CFO Jeremy Teetor has said that “technically, yes,” the board could wait until early May to send their request).

So on Tuesday night, the DAE announced “practice pickets and walk-ins” for 28 worksites in a play to try to force a delay on the board’s budget vote until the board commits to “greater budget transparency.”

“The Board is scheduled to vote on a budget proposal next Thursday even though there has not been clarity about the district’s finances or the number of frontline positions that will be cut,” the DAE said Tuesday in a press release.

While Monday’s meeting was not not quite a kumabaya moment in which workers and board members joined hands and used the power of friendship to vanquish the legislative foes of public education in Raleigh and D.C., it was still a polite and productive opportunity for board members to learn directly from workers about their most urgent needs and concerns, and there was agreement on some of the nine articles contained in the DAE’s priorities.

Areas of consensus on Monday included DAE’s Article 4 (no collaboration with ICE) and Article 6 (clear duties and printed contracts for staff).

“The thing that I’m excited about is that there’s nothing on here that [board members] haven’t been talking about,” said Harrell Goff, gesturing at the list of priorities. The Monday evening meeting was already scheduled before last week’s meet and confer vote, and three more board members are invited to meet with the DAE next Monday, though board chair Millicent Rogers has already said she is unavailable.

In response to Article 8 (no cuts to frontline positions), all three board members said that they strongly agreed. But they also pointed to a potentially difficult financial reality.

“We have the challenge of having a new superintendent, a new CFO, and a year where we’re facing the ESSER cliff, and I think they’re trying to figure things out and we are trying to clearly communicate—as a board does—our goals and our priorities and what’s important to us,” said Carda-Auten, referring to $3.6 billion in Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds which the state was required to spend by the end of 2024.

The conversation showed some of the complicated power dynamics between DAE and the board, which is responsible to Durham voters, deals with high-level policy and appoints the superintendent to oversee the daily functions of the district. Most of the board’s job consists of asking questions of the professional staff (like the CFO) when that staff brings recommendations (like a budget draft). Board members said several times Monday that they would push for answers to some of the most pressing questions at next week’s board meeting.

Relationships have frayed throughout the meet and confer policy discussions as the difficulty in passing the policy, for many educators, seemed to represent a lack of respect that public school workers receive in North Carolina today. On Monday, instead of hissing or cheering, educators in the audience silently held up red or green signs as the board members spoke. 

The last time board and union members were in a room together, the DAE stormed out after the board took a dramatic 4-3 vote to pass a version of the meet and confer policy that the union didn’t approve. That vote went mostly unmentioned until the end of Monday’s meeting, when the DAE pushed for an amendment to change the mechanism of certifying union membership, which they say was a last minute edit to the policy by the superintendent.

“We were cut out of being able to actually bring [the policy] back to our membership, and that’s unacceptable,” said DAE representative Allison Swaim. “What we got on Thursday was so disrespectful and such a—it was horrible, some of us were crying, it was just not a victory.”

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Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].