After more than a year and dozens of bargaining sessions, the Clovis Unified School District and the Association of Clovis Educators, the union of mental health professionals, are declaring an impasse.

They can’t agree on pay, staffing, or grievance procedures.

“This was not the outcome our negotiating team had hoped for,” the district’s spokesperson Kelly Avants said Tuesday in an emailed statement.

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Clovis Unified and ACE will jointly file the impasse with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB), which will appoint a mediator to step in.

Both say they’ve negotiated with Clovis Unified’s best interests in mind, including for students and employees.

“That’s been our goal the entire time, and our driving compass is what’s going to keep people here and what’s going to bring professionals here?” said Jade Edwards, a school psychologist and collective bargaining team member. “Because if the best people are doing this work, then it’s going to benefit our kids.”

Clovis Unified has negotiated the contract terms for about 70 mental health professionals.

“We have earnestly negotiated toward solutions that balance the entirety of interests of ACE-Psychologists and Mental Health Support Providers, and the district’s interests in negotiating a fair and fiscally responsible agreement in line with the demands of the District’s entire budget,” Avants said.

Last offers differed by 1%

To Edwards and her colleagues, the district can meet ACE’s demands while maintaining the budget.

The last time CUSD and ACE were at the bargaining table, ACE requested 14.5% salary increases, which they said would be an effective tool to recruit and retain mental health professionals.

The district countered with 13.5% raises.

Because of negotiations, the union has access to the district’s budget, Edwards said.

“And the difference is right around $100,000 to give everybody the 14.5% as opposed to 13.5%,” she said. “That makes a difference of about $1,000 per year to the employees (on the mental health team), which is significant for us.

“One hundred thousand dollars within a district budget is well within their means of being able to provide.”

The union is requesting “comparable” pay with school psychologists at districts such as Fresno Unified.

The district obtained an independent market study that showed the base salary and total compensation for CUSD psychologists is below that of 11 comparable school districts.

Edwards said that the market study and proposals used throughout negotiations have been based on last school year’s data in 2021-22.

“Since then, every neighboring district has gone up about 9% for salary increases,” Edwards said. “We were already at the bottom. The need to establish this contract at a competitive rate is very important. We want to make sure that this initial contract is a good base foundation to build from.”

In Clovis Unified, the mental health team has yet to receive the 7% pay bumps the board approved for employees in June because talks with the newly recognized union were in the early stages. They’ve also missed out on millions of dollars that were added to employees’ pay schedules as a result of the market study.

Mental health team wants negotiating power about staffing

From the start, the mental health professionals sought an “equitable and reasonable” caseload, a defined staff-student ratio, and enough time for their increasing duties spurred by the growing need for services.

Becoming a union and negotiating with Clovis Unified allowed the mental health team to negotiate with the school district about staffing ratios of employees.

“We wanted to continue being a part of negotiating staffing ratios in the future,” Edwards said. “We’ve worked with the district to develop staffing ratios.”

The school psychologists and mental health support providers want that moving forward.

The school district wants to “preserve its managerial right to determine staffing,” Avants said about ACE seeking more involvement in determining staffing and staffing ratios.

Clovis Unified, Edwards said, wants to consult with but not negotiate staffing changes.

“We want to continue to negotiate,” she said. “We felt that it was productive and meaningful this time around. We want to make sure we continue to have a voice in that beyond (them) just consulting with us.”

At odds over arbitration

Clovis Unified wants grievances resolved within the district, Avants said. ACE wants binding arbitration with a third party as an option in the grievance process, Edwards discussed.

“Binding arbitration offers a fair and impartial way to resolve conflicts,” ACE said in a Tuesday media release. “By agreeing to binding arbitration, both parties can avoid the uncertainty and expense of litigation and instead rely on a neutral, impartial specialist to hear their case and make a binding decision.”

Neighboring districts such as Selma Unified utilize arbitration as their final grievance level, following an informal complaint, written grievance, an appeal and mediation.

According to Edwards, an arbitrator would be unbiased, not connected to administrators, and trained to understand contract language in contrast to the seven-member school board.

In the meantime, both hope the mediation will lead to a solution that benefits Clovis Unified as a whole.

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