The Denver teachers’ strike is expected to end after negotiators from their union and the city’s school district reportedly reached a tentative deal in an overnight bargaining session.
The tentative deal was reached Thursday morning, according to the Denver Post, after negotiators met for more than 12 straight hours. The teachers union and school board must vote on the agreement to move forward.
Under the deal, teachers would receive average raises of 11.7 percent next year, the Post reported, adding that the district will put an additional $23.1 million toward compensation and set up a new 20-step salary increase schedule topping out at $100,000.
{mosads}Rob Gould, the union’s lead negotiator, praised the deal as “a victory for Denver kids and their parents and our teachers.”
“Educators in Denver Public Schools now have a fair, predictable, transparent salary schedule,” he said, according to the newspaper. “We’re happy to get back to work.”
The district’s superintendent, Susana Cordova, also lauded the deal and the “collaborative” nature of the negotiations.
“There was a recognition that we share many areas of agreement, and we worked hard to listen and find common ground on the few areas where we had different perspectives,” she said, the Post reported.
The strike over educator pay, now in its fourth day, was the district’s first in 25 years. It started after 15 months of failed negotiations between Denver Public Schools and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association.
The union was pushing for more reliable base pay increases instead of bonuses that the district has relied on as part of its ProComp compensation system, which expired last month after decades of use.
The district argued that incentive-based bonuses were beneficial to student achievement in high-poverty or low-performing schools.
Thousands of teachers began striking Monday in the demonstration, which affected about 71,000 students in 147 schools.
–This report was updated at 11:37 a.m.