CB & The Board Update

Hi Everyone -

We had our meeting with the school board last night. Our attendence was moderately good. I believe that there were 50 of us there at the beginning and between 20 and 30 who managed to sit through the 1:10 excutive session. I would have prefered Standing Room Only, but maybe that will come in the future.

We made our comments to the board, Mr. Charles Goodmacher our NEA UniServ and Mr. Eduardo Holguin, our NEA-NM President also addressed the board. The board members seemed in general to be favorably inclined to grant our request for voluntary recognition. Dr. Cockerham recommended not granting voluntary recognition until at least after receiving confirmation from the Public Employee Labor Relations Board that we had met the burden of 30% of the employees wanting collective bargaining.

Board members Joann Salazar and Joe Romero both made comments that indicated they would look favorably on recognizing us voluntarily pending confirmation from the PELRB. There was some talk about creating a local public relations board, Mr. Holguin spoke about that, questioning why we might want to spend a lot of money we don't really have to duplicate something that is available to us all for free, 30 miles away. We shall see where that goes.

On the whole, I was favorably impressed with the reception we recieved by the board and am hopeful that we will be engaged in collective bargaining in the near future. We still need people to do some training. Espanola-NEA is paying the registration fee, and $25 towards expenses (per day) for the first training in Santa Fe (6/15-16) and $100 a day for the second training in Ruidoso (6/22-23). The Santa Fe training is more about building our local and employee rights, the second is more about collective bargainging.

To register for the retreats: go to http://fd2.formdesk.com/NEA-NM/sar1santafe for the Santa Fe training or http://fd2.formdesk.com/NEA-NM/sar2ruidoso for the Ruidoso bargaining training.

I missed the conversation that went on regarding when recognition might be an action item - there was some talk about then next board meeting 6/6 and other talk about a special board meeting on 6/13. I will try and sort this out and post it here.

Thank you to all who showed up last night, and thank you all for your membership and support. Please consider reaching out and being more active. This is how we build success, one member at a time.

Brian

ps. To stay connected over the summer, email home email addresses to espanola.nea@gmail.com and chech this blog regularly.