DENVER — For the latest updates in the state's involvement in the DPS teacher strike, click or tap here.
Denver Public Schools will resume contract negotiations with teachers on Thursday.
The bargaining between the district and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association is set for 5 p.m. at the DPS Acoma Campus. The move comes as union members wait to find out if they can go on strike.
The Denver teachers strike was set to begin Monday morning. Teachers were planning to walk out after the Denver Classroom Teachers Association notified the district it was considering a strike on Jan. 8 -- and then voted a little over a week later to do just that.
But per guidelines, Denver Public Schools can petition the state's Department of Labor and Employment to intervene and block a strike. Per the union, the district did just that last Wednesday, giving the union 10 days to respond.
They did Monday by asking the labor department to stay out of the dispute and allow teachers to strike. The union argued they and DPS are the only ones that can fix the disagreement between them, and that the labor department's intervention was unnecessary.
The labor department now has 14 days to decide whether or not to intervene and stop the strike. In the meantime, the union said its teachers cannot strike and must report for work until they're told otherwise.
It's unclear if or when a strike will happen with Denver schoolteachers now that the state is legally involved in the process. In the meantime, all DPS schools will remain open and operating, according to the district.
The law allows the state to intervene and block a strike if both the school district and the union want help. That doesn’t apply in this case because the teachers union told the state on Jan. 8 that it doesn't want intervention.
The law also allows the state to block a strike if the head of the state's labor department decides it would be in the public’s interest, but nothing in state statute (CRS 8-1-125) says anything about delaying a strike to give the state time to decide whether to intervene.
Krystyna Biassou and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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