After starting the year with no contract, the Concord School District and teachers union have reached an agreement, according to Superintendent Terri Forsten.
“We believe that we have reached an agreement that is good for the district, good for our community and good for our teachers,” Forsten said in an email Thursday.
Forsten said the tentative agreement was reached Tuesday night and the district was not yet able to release any details.
At the start of the month, the school board declared the negotiations at an impasse. After a year of negotiations, the two parties agreed on most items in the contract, but remained stuck on three items: retroactive pay, stipends for coaches and other co-curricular positions, and salaries for teachers who were in their second and third years working with the district.
On average, starting teacher salaries would go up by 4 percent, and maximum salaries would rise to $91,836 by the end of the three-year contract, according to the negotiation committee’s update on the agreed upon items in the contract.
Nurses would see a roughly 8 percent increase for a starting salary of $41,500 in year one.
Forsten said the negotiations quickly overcame the co-curricular stipends and salaries issues but lingered over the question of retroactive pay.
Whether the contract will be publicly discussed prior to being voted on is unknown. Forsten said she wants to “work towards” having public input, but that decision would be up to the school board.
There are a few more steps that need to occur before a contract is voted on by the full board: First, the teachers’ union needs to take a ratification vote; then, the negotiations committee will make a recommendation to approve the contract. The board will then review the contract and put it to a vote. Negotiation committee meetings are scheduled into December, according to the school district’s website.
Concord teachers are among the highest-paid educators in the state. Last year, Concord teachers made an average salary of $73,531, which is the eighth-highest average in the state, according to Department of Education data. Regionally, no other school district comes close.
Average teacher pay in nearby Hopkinton ($64,315) and Bow ($62,884) is about $10,000 less than in Concord.
“It has been a longstanding objective of the Concord School Board to hire and retain the best teachers available and provide them with wages and benefits that are among the best in the state,” the district stated in its October negotiation update. “The offers put forth during the negotiations were consistent with this objective.”
In terms of starting pay, Concord teachers are slightly farther down the list, coming in 25th highest among the 155 public school districts in the state, with wages starting at $40,765. The closest area school districts with comparable starting salaries are Weare and Henniker, where starting teachers make about $1,000 less than Concord.
With incentives and other forms of pay, nine teachers in the school district made more than $100,000 in 2017, according to school district data.
The previous teacher contract expired Aug. 31 and the school year started without any pay increases.
In early September, many teachers did not attend back to school nights, an afterschool opportunity for parents to meet their children’s teachers and learn about their class schedules at the start of the school year.
A month later, on Oct. 1, teachers attended a school board meeting en masse, wearing red shirts and badges that read “CEA STRONG,” for Concord Education Association.
“It is time to end this standoff,” Michael Macri, president of the Concord Education Association, said at the meeting. “The taxpayers, parents and students in this district deserve to have their teachers respected and working under a fair and equitable contract.”