A professional teacher's group that promotes nonunion representation in negotiations with school officials about teacher employment said Wednesday that a fourth Oklahoma school district has decertified the Oklahoma Education Association as their representative.
The Strother School District in Seminole County took the action when teachers selected the Strother Professional Association as their bargaining representative, said Ginger Tinney, executive director of Professional Oklahoma Educators, a statewide independent professional association based in Norman.
"They went basically with themselves," Tinney said. The independent teachers group replaces the teacher's union in Strother and plans to implement a negotiation tool supported by POE called the Collaborative Communication Model to resolve issues such as student achievement and teacher salaries and working conditions, she said.
"It's a communication method," Tinney said. "It opens a direct dialogue in a non-adversarial way."
Becky Felts, vice president of OEA, said the process Tinney described is not unlike the collective bargaining process that the 40,000-member teacher's union uses in securing agreements for teachers in about one-third of Oklahoma's more than 500 school districts.
"She's describing our process as well," Felts said. The collective bargaining process is about open communications, she said.
"OEA has always supported the collaborative collective bargaining approach," Felts said. "It is about what's best for the employees and the students of the district. OEA has a long history of representing the interests of public education."
But it is up to teachers to decide whether they want to be represented by OEA or some other group. Felts said that when a district changes its bargaining representative, agreements secured by the previous representative may be voided.
"They go back to square one," Felts said. Things accomplished through earlier negotiations are lost, she said.
Tinney sais Strother is the fourth Oklahoma school district to decertify OEA since 2005 and the third this year. Last month, teachers in Dibble and Macomb decertified OEA and teachers in the Bridge Creek system decertified the union in 2005.
"We're really hoping that this will take off," she said.
Tinney said POE promotes the collaborative technique because it believes it is a more effective, up-to-date and open way of negotiating. She characterized traditional collective bargaining methods as an "antiquated, secret, us-against-them mentality" technique.
The bargaining method combines teachers, school administrators and a school board member into a working group that negotiates agreements between teachers and school districts. All certified teachers and other staffers can observe the proceedings.
"So there's nothing secret about it. It's much more open," Tinney said.
The process is about teacher empowerment, she said.
"Teachers want to be a part of this process," Tinney said. "We need a system that allows them to stay informed and involved so that they can work with school administration to make the best choices for students."
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
