INDIANAPOLIS — A state board has ordered the South Bend school corporation to resume conversations with teachers at Navarre Middle School and Coquillard Elementary as district leaders seek to have educators in the two schools removed from South Bend's teachers union.
In a meeting Tuesday in Indianapolis, the Indiana Education Employment Relations Board decided district leaders should include teachers from the two schools in union discussions while a hearing examiner further explores a complaint brought by the NEA-South Bend this winter.
The complaint stems from a long-standing plan to remove teachers from Navarre and Coquillard as an effort to offer greater incentives to educators working in those schools. Both Navarre and Coquillard are schools in the South Bend Empowerment Zone, created in 2019 to give support to several underperforming schools.
Teachers in Zone schools received raises of up $2,400 to $5,500 more than their South Bend district counterparts this year under the teachers' most recent contract to compensate for the additional work Zone educators pick up as a part of the schools' turnaround efforts.
Empowerment Zone officials first sought to remove Navarre and Coquillard from bargaining years ago by exercising a state law that allows districts to opt transformation zone schools out of bargaining if schools receive three consecutive failing grades under the state's A-F accountability system.
Navarre and Coquillard met that standard. Other Empowerment Zone...
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