October 27, 2005

By Diane Chiddister

The Yellow Springs teachers union accepted on Tuesday a new contract offer from the Board of Education, bringing to an end a lengthy and sometimes contentious negotiations process.

The contract provides teachers with raises over the next two school years while increasing their health care costs.

Shawn Jackson, president of the Yellow Springs Education Association, which represents the teachers, said a “significant majority” of the teachers present at a meeting on Tuesday voted to accept the offer. The union represents 52 teachers in the public schools.

Jackson said the teachers are “relieved that the negotiations are over so that we can concentrate on teaching, which is what we do best.”

School board president Rich Bullock said that he was “happy and relieved,” after the union accepted the offer.

“It’s been a long, hard process,” he said. “It’s good to have a contract and be able to move forward and think about other things again.”

The new agreement is slightly different from the proposal made by the school board two weeks ago that the teachers rejected.

Unlike that proposal, which offered a three-year contract and included language that would have reopened negotiations at the board’s discretion, the proposal the teachers accepted offers a two-year contract, with negotiations automatically reopening in 2007.

Like the previous offer, this latest proposal gives teachers a 3.5 percent raise this school year and a 2.5 percent raise next year. The earlier offer that the teachers rejected had included a 2.2 percent raise in the third year of the contract.

The new proposal also requires that teachers change to a higher co-pay structure with their health benefits plan, the same structure used by the school district’s staff and administrators.

The change in the new offer was significant, Jackson said, because “it didn’t lock the membership into the third-year salary increase.”

The new proposal “did what we wanted it to do,” Bullock said, by staying within “the parameter the board felt was necessary for the future financial health of the district and providing teachers with a healthy raise for the next two years.”

In September, the union had rejected a different proposal that would have given teachers a two-year contract with 1.5 percent base raises yearly along with a 1.5 percent cash payment. These were terms in the two-year contract approved earlier this month by the union that represents the district’s staff, the local chapter of the Ohio Association of Public School Employees.

The negotiations between the teachers union and the school board and top administrators were drawn out because of a disagreement over the financial health of the district, which has a $3.8 million surplus.

The teachers argued that because the district had such a large surplus it could afford to give teachers a raise that kept pace with inflation.

However, school board members said the surplus grew significantly when the district received a onetime tax payment from The Antioch Company when it restructured. Given rising health care and fuel costs and unstable state funding, school board members said they needed to be conservative with finances as long as possible. Board members said that any agreement had to stay in line with projections in the district’s five-year forecast and that the agreement had to allow the district to have a $100,000 surplus in five years.

The new offer came out of a negotiating session on Friday, Oct. 21, between union and board negotiators, their lawyers and a federal mediator. Following that session, the school board approved the proposal during a special meeting on Sunday, Oct. 23.

While the board has already approved the offer, Bullock said, it still needs to officially approve the revised salary schedule. The board will take that step either at a special meeting or at the board’s next regularly scheduled meeting on Nov. 10.

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com