Ken Witt, Julie Williams, and John Newkirk

More bad press for the controversial Jefferson County school board’s conservative majority, as the Denver Post’s Anthony Cotton reports:

Jefferson County District Court issued a temporary injunction Tuesday preventing Jefferson County Public Schools from implementing a pay plan the union complained was being imposed without required negotiations.

The plan would have provided higher base salaries for newly hired teachers. The temporary injunction granted Tuesday prevents the school district from using the new pay scale on any new teachers hired on or after May 1.

“Today is a victory for hard working Jeffco teachers who have sacrificed our own pay through pay freezes and reductions to help the school district weather the recession,” Jefferson County Education Association president John Ford said in a statement. “To offer thousands of dollars more to new teachers while neglecting to honor your promises to your current teaching staff is inexcusable.”

The board majority’s proposal to pay newly hired teachers more than some current teachers was broadly seen as a gratuitous attack on current Jeffco educators who don’t like the new direction of the district. This injunction, while it’s determined whether the new pay plan was implemented without required negotiations with the Jefferson County Education Association, is a setback for what conservative activists have admitted is a deliberate strategy to “break” the teacher’s union–as was done in neighboring Douglas County after a similar conservative takeover of the school board with dubious results.

This will make it a little harder for the board’s many surrogates to demonize the teachers going forward. Teacher pay negotiations are perhaps the one arena where conservatives have a natural advantage with the low-information public–and this kind of bad faith is how you blow that.