Twelve hours before Seattle classrooms opened the morning of September 2nd, a strike still threatened the first day of school. Seattle Public Schools and the Seattle Education Association reached a tentative contract agreement late the night before, after the union had already voted to authorize a strike on the first day of classes.

The dispute had been building for months. SPS asked to start bargaining back in March; the union didn't commit to an actual meeting until late June. From there, negotiations ran long and frequent, sometimes past midnight, sometimes on weekends. In an unusually long newsletter to families as talks intensified, Superintendent Ben Shuldiner broke with the normal practice of staying quiet during active bargaining, writing that with the union sharing its own side of negotiations publicly, "only one side is being heard from" otherwise. He laid out the district's position in detail: an opening offer of a minimum 8.8% raise over three years, pegged to the state's own cost-of-living formula, on top of a compensation structure that already pays the median teacher roughly $142,584 a year once base pay, contractual days, and "TRI" (time, responsibility, and incentive) pay are added to a $118,716 base salary.

Special education turned into the central sticking point. The district proposed lower staff-to-student ratios for most special-education students and more behavioral support within neighborhood schools. That would shift special education away from a separate physical space, where a student is described as being "in Focus," and toward providing the services their IEP calls for. The union's formal response to the proposal, per Shuldiner's account at the time, read only "Special Education," with no further detail. Talks broke down entirely in late August after the union submitted a counterproposal seeking millions of dollars more than an earlier offer and adding terms the union itself confirmed were not previously on the table. The district called it regressive bargaining and asked the state's Public Employment Relations Commission to assign a mediator the same day.

The agreement addressed much of the dispute from those final weeks, including how to approach special education. According to KOMO News' reporting on the final agreement, the district committed to spending a year and a half studying special-education changes before rolling out a pilot program by the contract's third year. Roughly 16% of SPS students currently have an individualized education plan. "Special education needs to be a service and not a place," Shuldiner said of the deal. Final raise figures weren't released immediately, pending both sides' internal votes, but Shuldiner said the numbers fit within a budget already carrying an $87 million deficit: "I'm really comfortable with what we agreed to."

The union never acted on its strike authorization. Both sides still had to ratify the agreement before the final numbers would be known, but the late-night deal meant roughly 50,000 students arrived for classes on time the next morning rather than facing a first-day strike.