Today's focus is multitasking

I'm sitting in bargaining with our classified staff represented by PSE obviously multitasking by checking my RSS feeds and now blogging. There are a lot of issues to resolve and each one seems to be taking an excessive amount of time so I find myself drifting in and out depending upon the topic. My observations of others in the room suggest that they are doing the same thing. It is a good thing that we have Buzz and Bruce maintaining focus on the task at hand.


What used to take a couple of days seems this year to be out of reach in the same amount of time. Why, what is changing? I believe that there are at least two significant drivers for this change. First, the economics of our current situation does not lend itself to the kind of flexibility that is necessary for meeting their money requests. Though this is not out of the norm for PSE bargaining, the scope is different because of the burden to support the state's rather large COL raise for formula units. Though the state does not see this as a mandate for all staff, we have historically given this increase to non-formula staff as well. At the same time we are seeing less growth in revenue for a variety of reasons and we have used as much of our fund balance as we believe is prudent to balance this year's budget. The need identified by our PSE staff does not go away because of our financial situation and where they have in the past acknowledged this and settled for less than requested, that may be changing in today's environment. I may be off base because we haven't even started discussing the money items, but I don't think so.


Second, we have seen a change in the association leadership. Where we have in the past seen a particular classification with much of the "power" today that is being distributed across more classifications. I believe this leads to more topics being included in the process and more items that result in discussions with only one or two members of each team actively engaged out of the 22 in attendance. This does not lend itself well to what we are labelling "interest based" bargaining. Because there are fewer of us engaged it turns into debate between the few people with less focus and problem solving taking place. When more are engaged, options emerge more rapidly and a probe is requested that guides the conversation into decision making. We have experienced this with some of the items. Though we know better, we are not practicing skillful conversations and that includes me. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out as our last scheduled day is tomorrow for only a half day. Maybe if we stay here late tonight something might change or, maybe not.


Back to the RSS feeds, here is another video you can add to your library. It is another one about the future of our young people. It is a revised version of When I Grow Up that I found on the Cool Cat Teacher Blog. If I already sent this in a past post please forgive me or send me a nasty reply telling me to get it together and stop wasting your time.