If your local district's agreement is not included on this site, you should be able to obtain a copy without too much trouble. Remember, collective bargaining agreements are public documents.
They are often posted on the school district or local union affiliate's website, so it is certainly worth a quick search to see if the agreement can be downloaded. Some districts may also have hard copies sitting around and you may be able to walk into the district's HR office or union headquarters and pick one up.
If you do find a contract posted online, make sure it is still current. Sometimes teachers operate under an "expired" contract until the district and union negotiate a new one. This process can take anywhere from a couple of months to two years in some cases.
If your district's collective bargaining agreement is not posted on either the district's or union's website, you'll need to request a copy from the human resource or labor relations department of your district or from the teachers' union. Because these are public documents you should have no trouble in this request, but just in case, it is a good precaution to cite your state's Freedom of Information Act.
Be aware that there are often
ancillary documents that complete the picture of your district's policies governing teachers. When making your request, it is worth asking if there are any MOUs (memorandum of understanding) in addition to the contract.
Once you receive the documents,
keep in mind that these documents address formal policy and do not reflect informal practice. How districts may execute policy may differ from the way it may be explicitly written in the contract or board policy. The contract should be the first step of many to understand how districts handle personnel issues.
You can also use the same model we use to help frame your research. You can benefit from our own trial and error, asking the same questions that we do-many of them modified repeatedly to achieve more exact responses.
View the list of detailed questions that we used to code the agreements in the database.