PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - Portland Public Schools and the district’s teachers union have signed a tentative agreement on a new contract for teachers, the district said Tuesday night.
The signed agreement follows a “conceptual agreement” reached earlier in the day after a 23-hour bargaining session, the district said in a statement.
The district’s 2,900 teachers had been prepared to walk out Thursday in Portland’s first teachers strike if no agreement was reached.
Teachers union president Gwen Sullivan told KATU-TV earlier in the day that “the strike is definitely off. We definitely feel it’s a fair contract.”
No details of the tentative agreement will be released before teachers have a chance to vote on it. If they ratify it, the Portland district school board will vote on the pact. It wasn’t clear when the teachers would vote.
Oregon’s largest school district has 48,000 students.
Teachers had voted overwhelmingly on Feb. 5 to authorize a strike.
Wearing a blue union sweatshirt, chief negotiator Marty Pavlik emerged from a hotel bargaining room around 7:10 a.m. Tuesday and said, “We’re done. We’re done.”
The agreement follows 10 months of negotiations over salaries, workloads and class sizes, length of the school year, and payments and benefits for early retirees.
Before the agreement and facing a possible strike, the district had made plans to cancel classes through Monday, then reopen with substitute teachers.
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