St. Paul Public Schools teachers, staff and supporters held “walk-in” demonstrations before school Wednesday to call attention to their dissatisfaction with contract negotiations.

Demonstrators wore red and stood outside more than 50 schools holding signs that began “St. Paul Students Can’t Wait for,” followed by a variety of hand-written contract demands. They then walked in to the school buildings all at once as students began arriving.

Negotiators for the teachers union and school district will meet for another round of mediation all day Thursday, with another session scheduled for next week.

Without “significant movement,” union leaders said, the negotiating team likely will ask the union’s executive board to authorize a strike vote.

If a strike vote is authorized, union president Denise Rodriguez said last week, “You can continue to mediate, and that doesn’t mean it’s ever going to go to a vote. But if there is not significant movement, I would imagine that the negotiation team would go to the executive board and ask them.”

The union’s contract priority is to get additional support staff to help with school climate and safety.

School district spokesman Ryan Vernosh released a joint statement following the last mediation session, Feb. 4, which said tentative agreements were reached on four issues.

“There was positive movement on several others but work remains to be done,” the statement read.

In an update to union members, the federation wrote that contract talks were “slow moving.”

“No progress was made on the key issues of staffing improvements, improving (English Language Learner) programming or co-teaching,” the update read.

The union said the parties tentatively agreed on proposals concerning school integration; time for special-education teachers to do paperwork; continuing the option for teachers to get paper pay stubs; and in what the union called “a major step forward,” planning money for staffs interested in redesigning their schools.

The district’s latest proposal on wages was a 0.5 percent salary increase this year and next year, in addition to step and lane increases. The union called that “lower than what our team would consider acceptable.”