David Quolke May 2016.JPG

Cleveland Teachers Union President David Quolke urges the school board to reject a contract proposal from a fact-finder at Tuesday's school board meeting.

(Patrick O'Donnell/The Plain Dealer)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - The Cleveland Teachers Union is making early threats of a strike in the fall as teacher frustration continues to rise over some controversial parts of the district's improvement plan - mainly over teacher evaluations and the district's first-of-its-kind pay plan.

Union leaders are asking teachers this week to vote to give them power to call a strike next school year. They are also asking teachers to reject a contract recommended by a federal fact-finder last week.

CTU President David Quolke said the proposal calls for a three-year contract between the teachers and the district, as the union wanted, but it does not fix the union's concerns with some key features of the

That improvement plan was passed by the state legislature and signed by Gov. John Kasich in 2012.

"While there are some pros in the Fact Finder Report, it does not provide the means to fix issues that are critical to reaching an agreement that is good for kids and fair for educators," CTU President David Quolke told the board. "In effect this would leave us with status quo for the next three years."

"That is not acceptable to me," he added. "That is not acceptable to the leaders of this union. That is not acceptable to our members that are in the schools each day."

The fact-finder's report itself was not made available to the public until after the board discussed it in closed session tonight. The Plain Dealer will provide more detail tomorrow. You can also see the full document below.

The strike authorization vote would give union leaders the ability to call a strike without any further vote of teachers, Quolke said. He said that would not happen this school year, but possibly in the fall if continued negotiations do not bring an agreement.

The school district also had issues with the fact-finder's recommendations. The school board voted 8-0 to reject the proposal tonight, at the urging of CEO Eric Gordon.

Gordon told the board that the fact-finder left many issues for the district and union to resolve after contract approval. He also listed several items in the proposal that the union had proposed to the fact-finder, but which the district's negotiating team did not have a chance to review.

"Accepting unclear or vague language would have the effect of creating an agreement where neither the Board nor the Union would know the terms and conditions of employment by which our relationship is to be governed," Gordon told the board.

Click here for Gordon's full statement.

The two sides will return to the negotiating table after this vote, Gordon said. Both he and Quolke said the report, though rejected, has moved the sides closer to agreement.

The Cleveland Plan called for major changes in how the district operates and with the rights of teachers.

Seniority is no longer the deciding factor for layoffs under the Plan, and principals have more authority than before to select teachers for their schools.

The Plan also threw out the traditional teacher raise schedules that most district use. In its place, the union and district agreed to a "differentiated compensation" system in which raises are given based on special training teachers have, on their qualifications for hard-to-fill positions, and the ratings teachers receive through their evaluations.

The union has raised complaints in the last two years over evaluations it considers unfair, over the number of teachers receiving raises under that plan and on delays in adding teachers to that plan.

Teachers in Cleveland were paid $69,133 on average for the 2014-15 school year, according to the Ohio Department of Education. The median teacher pay was $76,652.

Here's the fact-finder's report:

&amp;amp;lt;a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2829175/CMSD-CTU-Fact-Finder-Report-NO-ANNOTATIONS-Final.pdf"&amp;amp;gt;CMSD CTU Fact Finder Report NO ANNOTATIONS Final 2016 05 06 (PDF)&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;lt;a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2829175/CMSD-CTU-Fact-Finder-Report-NO-ANNOTATIONS-Final.txt"&amp;amp;gt;CMSD CTU Fact Finder Report NO ANNOTATIONS Final 2016 05 06 (Text)&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt;