USD 443, DCNEA continue contract talks; evaluation software, calendar and staffing pay top agenda

Dodge City USD 443 negotiators and representatives of the Dodge City National Education Association met for a bargaining session that focused on nonmonetary contract items, including whether to adopt the state evaluation tool Keep, changes to the school calendar and professional development days, department-chair and class-coverage pay language, and the role of the calendar committee in setting calendars that affect work days.

The session matters because the items under discussion affect teachers’ workloads, how evaluations are documented and stored, who votes on calendar options, and language that determines supplemental pay and assignment titles across USD 443 schools.

District and association negotiators spent the session reviewing an association letter of proposed changes and probing how the Keep platform would change evaluation workflows. Several teachers said Keep shifts the technical burden of uploading artifacts from administrators to individual educators and increases time spent preparing evaluations. “It’s shifting that burden from the administrator to the individual teachers,” a teacher who participated in the Keep pilot said, describing extra hours spent scanning and uploading artifacts. One teacher recounted working “7 or 8 different times just to try to get that one artifact to upload.” Another participant said teachers in a different…