On Thursday afternoon, Hawaii's public school teachers will head to polling sites across the state to vote on a new contract.
Tonight, HSTA leaders held a ratification informational meeting to go over details of the tentative settlement, and to answer questions.
According to the ratification highlights document, which was sent to teachers, their salaries would be restored to the 2009 levels in July 2013.
To qualify for annual salary raises, the teachers must receive an "effective" or better rating each year. In other words, their raises are based on performance.
"You want to tie our raises into evaluations, that's fine, but let us know what the evaluations are. But they won't let us know," said King Intermediate P.E. Teacher Brian Viola.
The document says that in the 2013 to 2014 school year, there will be a statewide implementation of a new performance based annual evaluation system, with 50 per cent based on teacher practice indicators and the other half based on teacher's contribution to student learning and growth.
"They won't tell us what the performance evaluation is. They're not telling us who's going to do it, how they're going to do it, (or) what's the criteria. So they want us to vote on this contract without giving us the information we need to make a good decision on it," said Viola.
Brian Viola has been a teacher for 19 years. He came to the meeting at the Hawaii Convention Center to ask questions and hoping to get answers, but left frustrated.
"They tell us they've negotiated a 50/50 medical split for us. For six months we were getting 60/40. We were paying 40 per cent," said Viola.
But the tentative settlement does call for the creation of a professional development program no later than July 2014. It will Increase personal leave days from five to six for each school year.
HSTA president Wil Okabe said in his letter to the teachers that he believes this settlement is worthy of their support and asks them to vote "yes" on the ratification day this Thursday.
Tomorrow there will be informational meetings on the neighbor islands. Check the HSTA website for details.
