US News and World Report article: Bronze Medal for North Branch High School

US News and World Report came out with their annual ranking high schools in the nation this week. Schools are ranked on the basis of College Readiness, Teacher/Student ratio, and math and reading proficiency. Schools are ranked as Gold (7 in MN), Silver (42 in MN), Bronze (93 in MN), or none. In all, 423 secondary schools in the state were evaluated.

May 2012 - Negotiations Update


As discussed at our most recent membership meeting, our negotiating team is taking a new approach to bargaining this time around - it’s called interest-based bargaining”.


Although we engaged in conventional collective bargaining for our first contract, we can see the benefits of interest-based bargaining. Instead of presenting proposals and counterproposals and arguing our positions until we reached a settlement that we could recommend to you for ratification, we are going through the contract article by article attempting to improve upon the existing language.


As a result, some articles are signed off unchanged while others undergo minor or major changes. We are also attempting to correct typos and grammatical errors throughout the process.


So far, we have been meeting on a fairly regular schedule – every other week. The team also meets in between sessions to prepare for upcoming sessions. As you already know, we cannot disclose details due to the confidential nature of collective bargaining, but we can say that we are moving at a decent pace and hope to begin bargaining the economic portion of the contract fairly soon.


As always, we thank you for your support and patience and can assure you we are doing everything possible to bring you a fair and equitable contract as soon as possible.

UNTF Members Elect Executive Board

On April 18th, 2012, UNTF Members voted in favor of electing a slate of new Executive Board Members presented at the General Membership Meeting. Voting was then extended via internet to full members who were unable to attend the meeting. The results are in and the slate has been approved.

Education Austin Calendar


Click HERE for the Google Doc calendar for Education Austin. Click on each event for more information.


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