Talks to end four-day Denver teachers' strike stretch overnight

[February 14, 2019]  By Keith Coffman

DENVER (Reuters) - Negotiations lasted all night and into the pre-dawn hours of Thursday between striking teachers in Denver and the city school district, who are trying to come up with a deal to end a walkout affecting 92,000 students that's now entering its fourth day, .

Both sides must believe that they are close to a settlement or they would have stopped for the night, a union spokesman said about 3 a.m. local time. He asked not to be named.

The two sides sounded an optimistic note on Tuesday after resuming talks that had broken off on Saturday. They went late into the night in an effort to resolve differences over a variable pay system, known as ProComp, which has been at the center of the dispute.

"We exchanged proposals that are moving us closer and are hopeful that we will get to an agreement soon," a joint statement by Henry Roman, president of the teachers' union, and Susana Cordova, the superintendent of the Denver schools, said late on Tuesday.

"However, we need a little more time to resolve the outstanding issues," they said.

The strike by the 5,650-member Denver Classroom Teachers Association is the first in Colorado's largest city since 1994. It follows a wave of teacher walkouts in Arizona, Kentucky, Oklahoma and West Virginia last year and a six-day strike in Los Angeles that was settled last month.

The Denver Public Schools district said all of its 207 schools would hold classes on Thursday, except pre-kindergarten. They will be staffed by substitute teachers and administrators, as they have been since the strike began.

Claiming that many teachers are leaving Denver because their pay increases have failed to keep pace with the city's cost of living, the union has been pressing for a salary structure focused less on bonuses under ProComp, or Professional Compensation, and more on general wage increases.

The union embraced the ProComp variable pay system as a way for teachers to build their salaries through a mix of incentives when it was instituted in 2005. But it now blames ProComp for eroding teacher pay in a city where the cost of living has soared in the past 10 years.

(Reporting by Keith Coffman in Denver and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; writing by Peter Szekely in New York, additional writing and reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; editing by Larry King)

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