The tug-of-war between the Pleasant Valley School Board and the teachers’ union continues.

Six of the nine school board directors convened for their regularly scheduled meeting Thursday, as the remaining three stayed behind to negotiate with the Pleasant Valley Education Association.

The two parties have one more scheduled meeting - today - before time is up on the Feb. 28 strike deadline set by the teachers union months earlier.

School board President Susan Kresge said the board wants to reach a contract agreement with the teachers union, but their goal is “to ensure that Pleasant Valley survives its fiscal problems and to the extent possible limit the financial burden on you. Anything short of turning our fiscal house around will be devastating to the community and will have long-term repercussions.”

Kresge reiterated that the current school board and the new appointments to the negotiations committee have been together for 90 days.

“The board will not be bullied into a settlement it cannot afford,” Kresge said. “The stakes are too high. The tactic of calling a strike mere days after this board was seated and mere days after the appointment of Dr. Konrad is a move that disregards all the pain that we’ve been through over the last two years.”

In mid-November, several teachers and union representatives protested the failure of negotiations. At that time, PVEA President Drew Dymond said, “This is the first time we have had an expired contract in Pleasant Valley for a very long time. We’re just looking for a fair, reasonable and competitive contract.”

Dymond said the union was also concerned about the furlough of paraprofessionals and the threat of furlough of teachers that past spring. He said they are concerned that the district will not be able to attract well-qualified teachers and retain them, or may not replace them at all.

“Striking is a last resort. That is not our number one goal,” he said in November. “The district’s finances are always going to be a sticking point for them.”

Fast forward to Thursday night, Jacqueline Brinker, PVEA communications chair, read a statement on behalf of Dymond, who was at the negotiations.

“The reorganization meeting happened on Dec. 2, 2021. Two weeks passed without any dates to start negotiating again. It was not until we issued a work stoppage date that we finally received a date in late January to restart negotiations, so to reiterate, we had to set a strike date just to get a date on the books to negotiate a contract.

“Many people think that the main sticking points are salary and health care, but the reality is we can’t even get the board to take us seriously enough to sit down and actually bargain, and that’s our biggest hang-up.

“The first two bargaining sessions in January resembled standard back-and-forth negotiations and many of us were confident that progress would continue throughout February, then the last two dates in February ended early at the board’s request. This was puzzling to us knowing what was at stake. We again got the impression that negotiation was not a high priority for the board.

“It has been said that we didn’t give the new negotiating team enough time. The new team had three months starting in December and chose not to start bargaining until late January.

“Last week, Dr. Konrad asked for nonbinding arbitration as well as fact finding. This process rarely results in settlement, and we took that as again the board trying to stall the process.”