Mead teachers union votes to strike if union, district don’t reach contract agreement before Sunday

Mead teachers and other staff may go on strike next week if their union bargaining team can’t reach a new contract agreement with the Mead School Board by midnight Sunday.

A strike by the Mead Education Association could delay the start of school, which is scheduled for Tuesday.

About 97% of the union members who attended a Thursday meeting voted in favor of authorizing their bargaining team to call a strike if even a tentative agreement for a contract isn’t reached by the deadline. If no agreement is reached, the union bargaining team can then call for a strike at any point.

It is the first time since the 1970s that the union has held a strike authorization vote, according to union President Toby Doolittle.

Representatives from the union and school district are scheduled to meet on Friday for another bargaining session after already meeting 16 different times since May.

Mead union President Toby Doolittle declined to share specifics of what is on the table in an interview last week, but said his union’s priorities surround designing systems for inclusion of students with special needs and preventing behavioral issues that pose safety concerns.

“This is not about salaries; we have zero proposals on the table that have to do with salary,” Doolittle said Wednesday evening. “This is about student safety that costs zero dollars for the district to implement for the proposals we’re making.”

Mead School Board President Michael Cannon wrote in an op-ed in The Spokesman-Review earlier this week that the district compensates its staff fairly and that too many districts have agreed to contracts they cannot afford, forcing cuts on services.

“We cannot – and will not – let that happen here,” he wrote. “We are grateful that taxpayers approved a healthy increase to the local school levy in 2024. Given the substantial investments made in educator compensation in recent years, taxpayers were promised we would use additional local levy funds to address critical needs in other areas, which included things like outdated curricula and updates to safety and security infrastructure.”