The two sides met again on Sept 1. 

VSIP:  We are close to a tentative agreement on a Voluntary Separation Incentive Plan.   The administration agreed to change the date for calculating years of service to better reflect years at DelVal and they agreed to extend health insurance benefits for both tenured and nontenured faculty.   The administration has also come around to improving the offered percentages for nontenured faculty.

Workload:  The sides are still far apart, with administration still discounting the work of faculty in hands-on labs and practicums. 

Economics:  While the administration decoupled raises from easily manipulated balance sheets, they continue to decline to honor the negotiated increase in matching to the retirement plans that was proposed in exchange for faculty sacrifices last year.   Since we have yet to see the benefit of that negotiation, we remain far apart in these proposals. 

Training: We presented a counter proposal to the administration’s training proposal.   Our counter limited the required training to three hours per semester.  Currently no training is mandated so this would be an increase in required training hours at the discretion of administration. 

We proposed additional times to meet in the upcoming weeks, but expect finding times without conflicts to be more challenging now that the union team is back in the classroom.   Additionally, there are several holidays creating conflicts this month.  We are waiting to hear back from administration on our proposed dates.