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Illinois School Board Journal
January/February 2002

About the survey

On September 14, 2001, IASB distributed a questionnaire to Illinois school district superintendents via facsimile. The 21 questions were designed to elicit the perceptions of superintendents regarding collective bargaining relationships and practices and needs for school board training in their districts.

From the 868 school districts receiving the fax survey, 511 responses were received within two weeks. A tabulation of frequency distributions showed that:

• Responding school districts appear to be spread evenly across the state.
• 499 districts (98 percent) reported their teachers are organized for collective bargaining with the school board.
• A school board member serves as the chief spokesperson for the school board bargaining team in 46 percent of the reporting districts. The most popular alternatives are a negotiations consultant (32 percent) and the district superintendent (18 percent).
• A large majority of teacher union contracts are for three years or more (82 percent).
• A small majority of districts reported using "traditional" bargaining processes (53 percent). An additional 12 percent reported using a variation called "expedited bargaining" to speed up the process.
• Most of the remaining districts (34 percent) said they use "win-win" or some other collaborative approach to teacher negotiations.
• About one in 10 districts appears to have tried and abandoned a collaborative approach to teacher negotiations.
• More than one-third of the reporting districts said some form of collaborative bargaining will be used for negotiating the next teacher union contract (15 percent) or is being considered (21 percent).
• It appears that a majority of board members and administrators serving on the school board bargaining team have received some training for the task. It also appears that much of that training has been obtained by attending panel sessions at the Joint Annual Conference or division meetings, although large numbers reported attendance at IASB/IASA workshops (34 percent) or workshops sponsored by law firms (28 percent).

Tables of frequency distributions from the survey may be downloaded from the IASB Web site (http://www.iasb.com/files/barg_surv.htm).