Teachers and district clash over proposed 60-minute daily planning at Karnes alternative school; committee agreed to study
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Summary
Negotiators discussed a proposal to move Karnes Building teachers to a 60-minute daily planning schedule for one year, with district leaders arguing it benefits students and teachers warning it would cut thousands of planning minutes; parties agreed to pause and form a teacher–admin committee and reconvene in July.
Negotiators for the Geary County Schools and teacher representatives debated a proposed change to daily planning time at the Karnes alternative school during a bargaining session.
Speaker 5 (Unidentified) opened the meeting and summarized several contract items, including compensation updates and a proposal to provide Karnes Building and virtual-school teachers "no less than 60 minutes" of planning time per day as a one-year pilot. "We're asking you to give 30 minutes back to kids because it's best for kids," Speaker 5 said, urging the group to try the schedule for one year.
Teachers and their representatives pushed back. Speaker 1 (Unidentified) said the proposal had not included teacher input or classroom visits for the staff who would be affected and described the change as being "thrown at us at the end of the year." Speaker 1 quantified the impact, saying that cutting planning time as proposed would remove about 3,440 planned minutes — roughly 57.33 hours, or about 9½ six-hour workdays — from the bargaining unit's aggregate planning time.
District negotiators, represented in the transcript by Speaker 3 (Unidentified), argued the change was limited to the Karnes Building and would increase face‑to‑face instruction, smaller class sizes and continuity for students who had not succeeded in larger-block schedules. Speaker 3 noted research and statewide averages for teacher planning time, saying many districts average 50–57 minutes per day and that the 60‑minute proposal was consistent with those figures.
Both sides proposed a collaborative approach to measure success: Speaker 3 suggested a committee of alternative‑school teachers and administrators to define metrics — including additional instructional minutes with qualified teachers, graduation-rate changes and how much prep time teachers actually require — and Speaker 1 responded that teachers should be actively involved in collecting and reviewing that data before any schedule change is finalized.
The session covered other contract items in brief (Speaker 5 summarized compensation-related articles, including a base salary figure shown as $47.09 and an approximate 1.5% increase) but recorded no formal motions or votes on the planning-time change. Instead, participants agreed to pause the current negotiations, take the discussion back to the board, and schedule follow-up bargaining in July. The group identified July 9 and July 10 as possible dates to reconvene at 9:00 a.m.
No final action was taken on the 60‑minute planning proposal; both sides left the meeting with a plan to form a joint teacher–administrator committee, collect the agreed data points and return with counterproposals in July.