AEA Bargaining Update Issue #17 February 8, 2007

AEA Bargaining Update
Purple Thursday
Issue #17 February 8, 2007

This Post made 2/13/07

Information recently shared by AEA under the heading:
"Budget Review Teams... These cuts, if implemented, would not adversely impact student achievement, and could help settle our contract." was misinformed and erroneous.

The errors were brought to the attention of Ron Fuhrer, President of AEA, who acknowledged the "mistake" and apologized to those who called the AEA Bargaining office to indicate he and his bargaining team had shared bad information to the entire AEA union through a union flyer distributed district wide.

Ron pointedly explained, "I have no plans to retract or correct our communications to the union members- an apology (over the phone) should be enough." Later, in greater detail he indicated there was no merit in sharing corrected information via the AEA Communications Committee "Purple Thursdays" flyer or any other method such as the AEA website. He further disagreed with the possibility negative union member or negative public perception would result from publishing incorrect data as fact. He concluded that the information in the flyer was not intended to cast anyone in a bad light and was not made public. However, the context of the flyer stipulates cutting a variety of AEA union member jobs (who pay their union dues) to "...help settle our contract".

At the time of this posting, the incorrect information had been made public by AEA , reaching well beyond AEA Union members via AEA. Regardless of the error, there is apparently no plans to retract the incorrect information from their public website.

Anchorage Education Association (AEA) Website error Article #17

As of this posting the public AEA site still hasn't corrected the inaccuracy in Article #17