Newtown Schools Dispute

This week we did the Newtown Schools Dispute and I was a board member on the West Newtown School District. Our strategy was to have a lead negotiator and have the rest of the board chime in with facts or other suggestions during the negotiation. I think that this was a really good way to go about doing this negotiation. Also, we started out talking about interests. We listed our interests so that the teachers would feel more comfortable listing theirs. 

The teachers said up front that if they didn’t like how things were going, they weren’t afraid to go on strike. In response to this, the board emphasized how we were going to try to meet their needs as best that we could, but a strike doesn’t solve anything. At the end of the strike, we would be back here negotiating just with upset parents, and a cut into the teachers’ summer. We made sure to emphasize interests and collaboration because we perceived the risk that they would go on strike to be relatively high. The negotiations started off pretty well, we were able to log-roll our most important issues with theirs. Toward the end when we got to the discussion on benefits, I think that both sides dwelled too much on the small issues. I think that the board didn’t do a good job explaining all of the things that we gave up for the teachers. So, when we got to the benefits, the teachers thought that they had taken more hits than the board. This caused the teachers to suffer from the decision making bias of framing and loss aversion. They saw the benefits as a potential for loss, so they irrationally were unwilling to incur any losses. I just felt like we kept going back and forth on the smallest unimportant issues because they weren’t willing to give much up. But in the end, I think that the negotiation had a good outcome for both parties.

When we talked about the negotiations of the other groups in class, I felt like they didn’t go as well because they didn’t start out focusing on interests. Also, the other groups seemed to make the mistake of focusing too narrowly on the issues. In a negotiation like this, the issues needed to be used to leverage other issues. Also, I think that it is a problem to start out with the small issues. This leaves limited time and energy to negotiate the most important issue. One group didn’t do so well because of this and I think that the other group got lucky.  I think it’s a better plan to start out with the big issues. When you decide on the big issues, they are not set in stone, you are still able to use the other issues to leverage the big one.

All in all, I feel good about how the negotiation went and the outcome.