This article was republished with permission from WTOP’s news partner InsideNoVa.com. Sign up for InsideNoVa.com’s free email subscription today.
This article was written by WTOP’s news partner InsideNoVa.com and republished with permission. Sign up for InsideNoVa.com’s free email subscription today.
Elections will be held for over 11,000 Prince William County Schools classified and certified employees to determine whether the Prince William Education Association will represent the two bargaining units in a collective bargaining process with the county’s school system. That was the announcement from both the union and the Prince William County School Board in a joint press release Monday.
In it, both parties agreed that the PWEA had met the signature threshold to hold elections for the school system’s classified staff bargaining unit, which includes bus drivers, food service workers, janitorial staff and others. Having already submitted the necessary signatures to hold elections for certified staff – teachers, nurses, counselors, librarians, social workers and some others – PWEA will now have the opportunity to represent both bargaining units if elected to do so by the employees.
While the elections for certified staff were initially planned to begin Jan. 3, PWEA attorney Broderick Dunn told InsideNoVa that they would be delayed slightly to allow for both bargaining units’ elections to take place concurrently.
“This is going to be the largest public sector election in Virginia history. With both bargaining units you’re talking about around … 11,000 employees. This is going to be the biggest in state history,” Dunn said. “It’s just been a huge lift by everyone involved, particularly PWEA, [the Virginia Education Association, PWEA’s statewide union] and I also want to give a shout out to the school division.”
The bargaining elections in January will undoubtedly be the biggest such votes in Virginia since the General Assembly ended a nearly 50-year ban on public sector collective bargaining last year. If PWEA gets the votes to become the exclusive collective bargaining representative for schools staff in the county, the division would be the biggest in the commonwealth to have an active collective bargaining process. Richmond Public Schools employees voted for collective bargaining representation earlier this year and approved their first collectively bargained contract last week.
To do the same, Prince William’s union will need a majority of votes cast in the two January elections and for at least half of all the employees in the respective bargaining units to participate in the election. PWEA leadership and Dunn have been particularly critical of that requirement, saying it holds the union to a higher standard than any elections for public office. But School Board members have said that they want to ensure that the elections represent the wishes of a significant number of employees, not just any small portion of the bargaining units that participate.
Recently, the two sides engaged in a contentious back-and-forth about delays in the process and key elections issues, most of which appear to be settled for now. According to internal communications with the School Board, elections will likely begin around the second week of January and run for several weeks, though no firm timetable has been established yet. The elections will primarily be carried out digitally, with employee-specific virtual keys issued to ensure their security.
“I’m glad they’ve reached their threshold, and we look forward to them having an election, and we encourage everyone to vote and have their voice heard,” School Board Chair Babur Lateef told InsideNoVa.
With the rights to an election now in hand, PWEA will likely focus on driving turnout for the two concurrent elections. The school system has roughly 7,000 state-certified employees and another roughly 4,000 classified employees spread across 94 school buildings.
PWEA, by contrast, has a little under 2,800 certified members and about 480 classified members on its rolls according to a recent membership report that was shared with InsideNoVa. According to Keith Greenberg, the neutral third party overseeing the process, the union collected statements of interest from just about 33% of the entire classified bargaining unit.
PWEA President Maggie Hansford declined to speak with InsideNoVa on anything regarding collective bargaining.
“I’m ecstatic, and I will do what I can to help them reach what they have to do to successfully win collective bargaining,” School Board Member Justin Wilk, Potomac District, a longtime bargaining supporter, told InsideNoVa.
If PWEA succeeds in the two elections, the union would represent employees in contract negotiations over compensation and working conditions, though some matters like job descriptions would remain off the bargaining table, per the bargaining resolution the School Board passed earlier in October. There will also be no binding arbitration in any future contract disputes, something the union has also criticized. The school division’s legal counsel has said that binding arbitration would be legally dubious for a School Board given that it lacks taxing authority. Instead, the School Board simply determines how to spend the funding that’s appropriated by the local, state and federal governments.
