The Daily Sentinel: As 40 of their teaching colleagues provided comments inside, more than a dozen other Mesa Valley Education Association (MVEA) members outside huddled around a laptop connected to an extension cord and perched atop several boxes in order to follow the school board meeting live.

Tuesday night’s Mesa County Valley School District 51 Board of Education meeting at R-5 High School was already set to be tense as the district and the teachers union remain at odds in their negotiations, with mediation sessions beginning Wednesday to bring the sides to more common ground on issues such as class size caps, the district’s steps and lane payment structure for teachers, language surrounding a Student and Staff Safety Committee, and stipends for school psychologists.

That tension ramped up when D51 security officers stepped outside and informed the crowd of well over 70 people in red MVEA shirts that, once the Harry Butler Board Room cleared out after recognitions, only 52 people would be allowed inside. This drew the crowd’s ire. When one security officer asked the crowd to work with him to keep things orderly, one MVEA member in the crowd responded, “You won’t work with us!”

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