A revised contract for Allenstown teacher salaries overwhelmingly failed in a town vote Tuesday, the second time salary increases were brought to resident’s attention this year.
Votes for the two warrant articles fell 268 to 128 for the teacher’s contract and 249 to 146 for the paraprofessional’s contract, a vast difference from the relatively close votes of 295 to 263 for teachers and 290 to 276 for paraprofessionals during town meeting in March.
With the articles’ failures, the salaries and other contractural language from last year is “frozen” and will carry into the coming school year, said Tony Raymond, a seventh and eighth grade social studies teacher and president of the Allenstown Teachers Association.
“It is certainly not the outcome that that we were hoping for,” he said. “We understand that this is the process, and we will just have to accept it and learn to live with it.”
Superintendent Jack Finely could not be reached for comment at the time of publication.
The school district proposed a one-year contract with a 3.5% raise for salaries across all positions in the warrant articles. The contract before voters in March looked different: a two-year contract with a 5% increase the first year and a 2% increase the second, as well as a change in health insurance.
The amount of money the district asked from taxpayers also decreased between proposals. It originally asked for $99,535 for the paraprofessional contract and then asked for $44,930; for teachers, it initially asked for $174,263 and then changed to $163,628.
The proposed tax rate increase is 8 cents per $1,000 of property value for the paraprofessional contract, and 31 cents per $1,000 of property value for the teachers’ contract.
Raymond said he couldn’t speak for all Allenstown residents, but speculated the vote’s failure could be related to concerns in already high property taxes.
“I don’t get the sense that the town has a vendetta against educators,” he said. “This is a town where half the area is owned by the state of New Hampshire, so with Bear Brook State Park here, property taxes can be pretty significant, and that is definitely a factor in a lot of people’s votes.”
Coming into the new school year, Raymond said staff will have to face a pay cut as insurance premiums rise and there’s not an increase to supplement that.
The district has lost several teachers and support staff since March, but Raymond said positions have been getting filled. The issue, though, is the loss of consistency and retention among staff, which is wholly important for a K-8 school like Allenstown Community School.
“You want to have familiar faces in the building, and it would kind of go against that vision if we end up becoming a revolving glass door,” he said.
