When former baseball player Yogi Berra said, "It ain’t over ‘til it’s over!”, he succinctly described the essence of a baseball game. Baseball, as distinct from most other sports, is not time limited. In stark contrast to baseball, however, our staff meetings are time limited. When they’re over, they're over.

The amount of time spent in staff meetings has been a significant issue in the last two rounds of contract negotiations. In 1997 our bargaining team attempted to limit the amount of time spent in meetings by tying the beginning of the staff meeting to the end of the school day and limiting the meeting time to ninety minutes. A debate ensued as to what constituted the end of the day. The ROEA’s interpretation is that the workday ends five minutes after our last teaching assignment is over. For purposes of staff meetings the clock should start at that point regardless of whether the meeting actually begins. Starting the clock quickly (in order to end the meeting as quickly as possible) was the clear intention of the bargaining team. That intention was reflected in the contract language in 1997.

In 2000 negotiations, the new bargaining team continued to make a strong case that our staff meeting time was excessive (according to our informal survey of other districts, we may have the most amount of staff meeting time in the County). We were successful in reducing the total number of staff meetings in the year and the amount of time of the first monthly meeting.

At the February Joint Committee meeting, the administration said that principals have reported that teachers have abruptly left meetings when the contract time was up or impolitely pointed the time out to the principal. Our response was that while very short and infrequent time violations may be overlooked in the interest of civility, frequent and excessive time violations (ones of more than a few minutes) were unnecessary and unfair to teachers. Principals and other administrators who continue to violate the contract in this area need to be more respectful of our rights and end meetings at the proper time.

There are different ways to approach this issue if it is a problem in your building. The administration suggested the use of the BFC as one way to resolve staff meeting problems. We agree. As a BFC agenda item the discussion should then become part of the staff meeting. You may also want to consider using the grievance procedure for continual violations of our rights to a time limited meeting. Either compensatory time or additional pay for additional service could be requested in a formal grievance procedure.

We do have an obligation to be at staff meetings. We should make them a priority and be at the meeting at the end of the workday. However, the failure of individual teachers to be timely neither delays the start of a meeting nor justifies the denial of contract rights to other teachers.

Finally, we should not quite equate protecting our contractual rights with a lack of professionalism. This is an administrative view of the contract. (on the Joint Committee agenda. The issue was labeled by administration as “Professional vs. Hourly employees”). As teachers, we work hard and we work well with students all day—–that is the essence of teacher professionalism. A staff meeting that runs over the allotted time is at best bureaucratic inefficiency and at worse a violation of our rights. Our desire and right to leave work in a timely fashion has nothing to do with a lack of professionalism. It has everything to do with the very important right to resume our personal and family lives and commitments. This is what we are protecting when we fight for our right to time limited staff meetings.