The teachers filed into Monday’s Concord School Board meeting as a group, wearing red shirts and badges that read “CEA (Concord Education Association) STRONG.”
Throughout the meeting, they talked among themselves, sometimes speaking up when school board members spoke. They clapped after some union members spoke during public comment about the importance of their jobs, and the frustration they feel coming into October without a contract.
Teachers and nurses have been negotiating with the district for a new contract for over a year; but after more than a dozen negotiation sessions and one mediation meeting, the two parties were unable to come to an agreement, and the contract expired Aug. 31.
Though recent tensions have been described as “a standoff” and “an impasse,” there are also reasons to believe that a resolution for a three-year contract seems close at hand, with a tentative agreement in place for all but three items: retroactive pay, the co-curricular stipends and salaries for teachers with bachelor’s degrees in years two and three.
“The biggest message I heard from last night is that both sides want to resolve this,” said school board president Jennifer Patterson on Tuesday. “We’re not separated by that many differences … I believe that will transplant itself into a resolution.”
But teachers at the meeting seemed frustrated that the process has taken so long, and angry that negotiations are still stalled. To protest the lack of a contract, many teachers did not attend the district’s various “Back to School” nights.
“I feel like I’m back at my seventh-grade dance. Here’s one side and here’s another, and you wonder how did we ever mingle,” Dawn Morris, a teacher at Mill Brook Elementary School, said Monday night. “To feel like … no one wants to pay us retroactive pay, it’s very hurtful.”
Morris, who has worked 29 years in the district, described teaching as her world – “and my world has perhaps been your children,” she said. “… it’s about everything they are.”
Michael Macri, president of the Concord Education Association, said negotiations have been ongoing since Aug. 20 of last year. The first meeting between the CEA and the school district’s negotiators – three members of the administration – didn’t take place until Jan. 3.
From then until June 7, Macri said the CEA proposed a 2 percent cost of living increase for each year of the contract, but the district refused. A mediation meeting on April 11 was not successful.
On July 26, the district agreed to revise its proposal, which the CEA did not receive until Sept. 10. That proposal, according to Macri, “completely destroyed the order inherent in CEA’s current salary matrix and step multipliers,” and changed how teachers who participate in co-curricular activities are compensated by freezing stipends for two of the contract’s three years.
CEA presented its own counter offer, along with the 2 percent cost of living increases, which was rejected. Ultimately, CEA came up with “a more stable and orderly” version of the district’s proposal, which was accepted. However, they rejected requests to keep co-curricular compensation the same and that the pay increases be retroactive.
Both parties expressed frustration at the situation.
“The negotiations are considered deadlocked at this point,” said Nathan Fennessy, at-large school board member and chairman of the negotiations committee, saying the process is now at an impasse.
“It is time to end this standoff,” Macri 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.”
After a year of negotiations, the two parties have a tentative agreement on most items in the contract.
The last offer made by the district team would increase the starting teacher salary by a little over 3.5 percent, according to the negotiation committee’s update, and increase the maximum salary to $91,836 by the end of the three-year contract.
Nurses would see a roughly 8 percent increase for a starting salary of $41,500 in year one.
On average, a first-year teacher’s salaries would go up by 4 percent, said district finance director Jack Dunn.
Teachers with a bachelor’s degree on their fifth or sixth year currently make $51,559, according to the committee’s presentation; under the district’s proposal, those teachers would see a $3,940 increase in the first year of the contract or 7.6 percent.
In contrast, teacher’s with a master’s degree on their max step with at least 14 years of service make about $83,000. They would see a 3 percent increase in the first year of the contract, or about $2,481.
Dunn said one of the district’s goals is to raise the base pay of new teachers in order to attract younger employees. To do that on the current salary system would cost the district $1 million, he said.
The district’s proposal would raise the base pay but shrink the steps, Dunn said.
Healthcare remains relatively untouched, with the district continuing to pay 95 percent of the teachers’s health insurance premiums for the majority of teachers and 85 percent for those hired after June 30, 2015.
The proposed contract would keep language around what would happen if a so-called “Cadillac Tax” – a 40 percent excise tax on high-cost health plans at a certain threshold – were imposed but remove a start date, Concord superintendent Terri Forsten said. Previous contracts have included a supposed start date for the tax, but that language has proved to be unnecessary as the date continued to be pushed back by Congress.
The negotiation committee made an offer on the three open times recently, Fennessy said. They have not received a response.
Jason Faria, the CEA’s new UniServe director, argued that the two parties are not at an impasse, considering how far the parties have gotten.
“When someone make a huge move like that,” he said, referring to the salary decision, “that has all the elements not of an impasse, but of being in the home stretch of solving a problem.”
(Caitlin Andrews can be reached at 369-3309, candrews@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @ActualCAndrews.)