By the end of the first five hours of compensation negotiations, representatives bargaining on behalf of teachers and support staff in Durango schools were weary but content with their progress. They made quaint jokes as they prepared to close the meeting, which occurred a little before 9 p.m. – ahead of schedule – Wednesday.

By 9:05 p.m. Thursday – after another five-hour negotiation, now five minutes behind schedule – the union’s representatives were feeling “deeply angry,” “pretty upset” and “disrespected.”

The Durango Education Association and the Durango Education Support Professionals Association, which represent a combined 743 licensed teachers and support staff in Durango School District 9-R, will enter day three of compensation negotiations with the district on Monday.

Parties are not deadlocked. But progress has been trudging as they venture from vastly disparate positions.

On Thursday night, the union brought their request for a 15% cost-of-living increase to the natural movement pay scale that accounts for experience and merit, down to a 6% increase. Suspending natural movement is “a nonstarter,” the union says, and they are seeking a cost-of-living increase atop it.

The administrators had offered several options, including the natural movement with no adjustment, a $1,700 one-time stipend to all staff, a $1,000 bonus to all staff and an increase in wages to starting salaries. The latter two would include the caveat that natural movement be suspended.

And to the surprise of the union, district administrators appear intent on reexamining the pay scales. The administration’s team, unofficially led by Executive Director of Human Capital Laura Galido, has offered numerous options that include freezing the step plans and forming a focus group to examine them going forward.

“We cannot sustain natural movement with the revenue that we are receiving,” said Director of Finance Kira Horenn. “So, every year our natural movement exceeds revenue.”

The team, as the facilitator Dennis Carlson refers to them, given the interest-based negotiating model they use in the hopes to keeping bargaining copacetic, is composed of 10 teachers and staff members and one representative from the Colorado Education Association forming one side; on the other sit Board of Education Treasurer Rick Petersen, two school principals, the district supervisor of facilities, Chief Operations Officer Chris Coleman, Horenn and Galido.

With increasing observable frustration, two sides are pushing against one another. On one side sits the district’s teachers and support staff, one of which made just $24,000 last year. On the other, some of the district’s highest paid employees. And between them, a looming, seemingly un-budgable obstacle: Colorado’s reviled, unpredictable mechanism for funding schools, which routinely puts the state among the lowest-ranked states for public education funding.

Horenn, the finance director, laid out what was, as she saw it, the district’s fiscal reality on Wednesday.

Although revenues will be up modestly next year – somewhere along the lines of $730,000 – the district’s expenses will increase by much more than that, she said, because of scheduled pay increases, rising insurance costs and other inflating costs.

9-R will face a deficit ranging from $2.2 million to $3.5 million next year in its operating budget, according to Horenn, depending on whether the federal government releases education funding to Colorado it has said it will withhold over diversity, equity and inclusion-related activity. That would deprive Durango schools of $1.3 million next year.

Currently, student service providers are paid according to a decade-old step system that staff members advance each year; licensed teachers receive between a 3% or 4% raise each year for four years before a points accumulation system kicks in and slows merit-based increases, which occur in jumps of generally just over 4% (but sometimes as much as 7%) over the course of a few years.

The main contention during negotiations was the use of the district’s unrestricted budget reserve of about $7.1 million. The district also has $11.4 million in reserves per state law and the board of education.

Teachers and support staff members say they need cost-of-living relief now.

They want to use that money, or some portion of it, to pay for raises, given that the district’s coffers have swelled over the last five years. The proposed 6% adjustment would cost the district about $3.5 million next year. Future school financing is always uncertain, they posit, but “the need is immediate for our constituents,” DEA negotiator Ameryn Maestas said.

But administrators are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of using a non-replenishing cash reserve to pay for salaries, which are an ongoing expenditure.

“It would be irresponsible to tap into an unassigned fund balance for recurring costs,” COO Coleman said.

By the end of Thursday, parties on both sides agreed on one thing: They were looking at the same financial information and drawing different conclusions.

Statistics presented by the administrators – the district spends 87% of its budget on compensation; the 577 students lost to charter schools short the district $6.6 million in per-pupil funding; insurance premiums are expected to rise 16.5%, which will cost the district between $561,000 and $808,000 depending on how much it saddles upon employees – painted a clear picture of the district’s financial stress.

There is no definable, continuing source of revenue for raises, they say.

Union negotiators wove tales of their own financial stress and that of their members.

One DESPA member received a late paycheck and came home to an eviction notice on her door, Durango High School Building Tech Erin Carlson said.

Peter Fogg, a high school physics and computer science teacher, said he knew teachers in their first four years of work – meaning they get automatic raises each year – who now net less savings today than in their first year because of increased cost of living.

One teacher told a negotiator that they wait until the last possible moment to buy groceries.

“Budgets are a list of priorities,” said Jake Richmond, a special education paraeducator at Riverview Elementary School. “Employees like me are reminded every month on payday that we are close to the bottom of that priority list.”

Yes, Durango’s starting teacher salary of $51,500 is above state and national median levels, the union acknowledged. But compensation does not remain so buoyant, by comparison, over time.

“We are lagging behind in state benchmarks when it comes to career-long pay,” Richmond said.

On Wednesday and Thursday, teachers in red union shirts arrived, about 100 at the peak, to the five-hour bargaining sessions.

As each side left to caucus among themselves, the room filled with teachers munching pizza and chattering, which crescendoed into cheers of appreciation each time the bargaining team returned to the table.

The interest-based negotiation style is written into the master contract. Unlike traditional positional bargaining, it involves a series of steps designed to ensure that all parties get to share their thoughts, feelings and priorities and can hear out one another. It resolves only with consensus of the entire team and is intended to better preserve relationships between parties going forward.

But when it comes down to compensation, the parties can at times struggle to avoid getting positional, facilitator Dennis Carlson acknowledged.

“I have an interest that 9-R staff don’t go two years in a row without a cost-of-living increase,” Cody Dreher, who works with the state education association, said during a section of the negotiation dedicated to sharing interests.

“I have an interest in creating a compensation system that results in staff truly understanding the increases they are receiving in compensation each year,” Galido said shortly after, her tone growing exasperated. “We continue to increase salaries each year. But that’s not what we hear.”

On Wednesday, someone cut in.

“I have an issue with this,” a DEA member observing from the audience interrupted. “I need to say this, because I’m having a problem with the fact that some people, their stories are about food and food sensitivity, and we have a speaker who’s controlling our money saying that ... .”

Another DEA member cut the man off and ushered him out of the room.

Thursday’s negotiations made the administration’s priority clear: suspend the scheduled steps that some, but not all staff members, were scheduled to take this year and create a focus group to examine the structure going forward. To sell the idea, they have repeatedly offered stipends that would equally (although not equitably, the union says) provide some relief to all staff, disproportionately benefiting the lowest paid among them.

DEA and DESPA negotiators, however, were unwilling to budge.

Anything that suspends natural movement is “a nonstarter for our members,” Fogg said, on the basis that the step system had been hard-won in previous negotiations.

“We did not expect that, nor should we have to,” Maestas said in an interview with The Durango Herald on Friday. “I think that has been incredibly frustrating. Natural movement is something that’s expected by the district. It’s predictable. They have data about how and when people will move, and that is part of our contract. It’s something that people work for years to amass enough points to make a move.”

By 8:30 p.m. Thursday, union negotiators had grown exasperated, particularly with Galido, whose often affectless demeanor was received, at times, as didactic and condescending.

“I’m tired of being spoken to like I’m stupid,” said Erin Carlson, the DHS building tech. “I’m tired of being spoken to like I don’t understand.”

Although the union said that a 6% offer was its final one, the parties will reconvene at 8:15 a.m. Monday for a third round of negotiations. If no agreement is reached, the parties will bring in a mediator for arbitration. If that doesn’t produce a contract acceptable to DEA and DESPA, the teachers and staff members could conceivably strike, although that threat has not yet been made.

Although Thursday grew tense, Board Treasurer Petersen said he still has faith in the process, to which everyone is seemingly still committed.

“We’re open and willing to hear further options from the district,” Maestas said. “We are not willing to accept a freeze in natural movement or stipend. We are negotiating for a (cost-of-living adjustment), and that will remain our position.”

rschafir@durangoherald.com