How’s collaboration going?

Make your Voice Heard

The CEA All Member Survey is now live! This is our once-a-year opportunity to hear directly from educators across Colorado. The insights we gather are essential in shaping the future of public education, guiding our advocacy, influencing policy, and driving negotiations at the bargaining table.

The survey is open now and closes October 13th, so take the survey today!

Article 10: Collaboration

At your school, who is making decisions about the calendar? How about the school schedule? What about the professional learning provided at your school? The answer to all of these questions should be your school’s collaborative committees!

Before the first day of school, all school staff should come together and review the list of decisions that are made in a school year, and determine if you would like them to be made by command, consult, or consensus. Each of these terms means:

• Command belongs to admin. Some decisions by default, like anything that is an urgent safety concern, falls under a command decision, but you can decide as a staff you would like you admin to have the ability make more command decisions. Your admin’s responsibility is to clearly communicate the decision and how staff is to implement it.
• Consultative means the admin makes the final decision AFTER consultation with stakeholders: staff and perhaps parents and even students. Admin responsibility is to clearly communicate the decision and why it was chosen.
• Consensus is a process where a committee lands on a decision that can be supported by everyone. This is how all committees should be making decisions, not majority rules (unless you first try to come to consensus and it cannot be reached).

The contract calls for three collaborative committees:

• The ALT (Academic Leadership Team) makes school wide academic decisions, such as curriculum implementation, topics for school professional learning, identification of school-wide academic interventions to be used in MTSS, etc (see 10-7-2 for full list).
• The OLT (Operations Leadership Team) makes decisions about school operations, such as school based calendars, budgeting priorities, scheduling the 22.5 additional hours in Article 5 for your school, etc (see 10-6-2 for full list).
• The PBST (Proactive Behavior Safety Team) makes decisions about school wide student behavior interventions and supports, such as behavioral interventions to be used in the MTSS process, training for staff on school wide student behavioral expectations, creating the school Prevention & Intervention (P&I) Manual, etc (see 10-8-2 for full list).

Your school may collaboratively decide to have more committees than what is in the contract, but that is not a requirement. Representatives for all committees will be selected through staff voting.  

Once you have your committees in place, the first thing all members should do is:

• Decide when to meet: at least monthly
• Choose a meeting facilitator, process monitor/ time keeper, and note taker
• Create and follow norms
• Create an agenda and outcomes ahead of meeting time, and allow all members of the committee the ability to add to the agenda
• Create procedures to gather feedback from stakeholders to inform agenda items and discussions: this is really important! Remember you are an elected representative of your team or department, so you need to gather their feedback and keep it in mind when making decisions.
• And after a decision is made, determine how you will communicate it out to the whole staff and implement the decision

Whew! That was a lot! BUT this Article of our contract is the foundation upon what many others are based. Even one skipped step in the collaborative process can have a big impact, so if you are concerned your school may not be following the processes in Article 10, talk to your AR about problem solving the issue with your Principal.

Contest! Design a shirt!

Members! We are looking for new designs for our JCEA online swag shop and want to feature YOUR design. JCEA is hosting a t-shirt design contest and we need members like you to get creative.

Artwork Criteria:

• Art must be received in either of our preferred formats – Adobe Illustrator files are preferred, but we can also work with high-resolution PDFs
• The art should be a single color design, which will be printed on the t-shirt color of your choice from this list. For examples, see the designs in our online shop.
• Must incorporate a union and/ or JCEA theme. The JCEA logo is available for you to incorporate into your design (png file, eps file) but will be added to the winning design if it is not already included in your original design.

The contest opens now and will end at 8:00am on Monday, October 21. The winner of the contest will have their design featured in our online store, receive a free shirt with their design, and receive a shout out on our JCEA social media (plus your colleagues can wear your design!). All designs must be submitted to this form (also linked at the button below) to be considered for the contest.

Are you excited? We are too! We can’t wait to see what you design!

If you have questions about the contest, reach out to cwiggins@coloraodea.org