I opened today’s paper and saw the following….

“Minnesota school districts must share tentative employee contracts with the public before the employees and school boards vote on the contracts, a state agency ruled in response to a Forum request.”

While I totally agree with the ruling and thus informing the public, I disagree with how the Forum wants to do it.  Here is some background information and why I think the school districts and the union need to inform the public in a different way.

This all started earlier when the Fargo Forum contacted the Department of Administration earlier this spring after Moorhead Public Schools refused to share details of its tentative two-year agreement on the teacher contract until the day the board voted on it.

The Moorhead School District closed negotiations with its teachers union on Jan. 1 after two sessions of help from an outside mediator. The representative from the State Bureau of Mediation Services lawfully closed the negotiations session.   The district subsequently refused to disclose any details of the tentative agreement until 10 days later, when the school board voted on the contract.   The teachers ratified the agreement on that same day while the school board studied it in a closed meeting.

The Forum argued that though Minnesota teachers unions and school boards can close strategy sessions, the tentative agreements that are developed must be publicly shared if before the school board votes to ratify the agreement.

As a taxpayer, I am completely in favor of informing the public of the contract prior to it being voted on by the school board.  As a teacher, I do not trust the Forum to do that job of informing without bias or misleading the reader.  The newspaper depends on its ability to “hook” its readers with controversial statements and solely focuses on small parts of the contract that are very personal to its readers in order to sell papers.

Members of the community deserve to be informed, not mislead.   I would rather see the teachers and district get together and construct a joint press release that could not be tampered with in order to lure readers.  If that would mean purchasing ad space, the cost of that could be shared.  There just has to be a better way.  The Forum (and all newspapers) print what they want….period.