The Regional School Unit 40 Board of Directors and the Medomak Valley Education Association – the collective bargaining unit for teachers in RSU 40 – have both unanimously approved a new three-year contract for the district’s teachers.
The school board voted to approve the contract at its June 18 meeting, which board Chair Danny Jackson and Paul Forest, the president and chief negotiator of the Medomak Valley Education Association, both signed.
Negotiations for the contract began in January and concluded significantly more quickly than the roughly two years it took the school board and the Medomak Valley Education Association to come to agreement on the current contract.
“We eliminated the point of contention from the last contract, which was a student performance incentive. That’s what took up most of our time,” Forest said. “At one point we went into mediation and that’s where this incentive came up, and we spent the rest of our time fighting against that.”
“In the end, we ended up going with it just to give it a try, I guess, give it the benefit of the doubt. We figured out it was a little more difficult to fund than we thought because it’s based on test scores and each [school] building has its own set of goals. So it would be a monster to keep track of,” Forest said.
Under the current contract, if school-wide goals were met, teachers would receive an additional $1,000. If the goals weren’t met, the funds would be used for professional development to improve teaching and student performance, according to The Lincoln County News archives.
Though the incentive pay scheme was eliminated, the new contract does include a new 90-minute period of professional development time for teachers each week.
The time will extend the teachers’ work day by one hour each week, but cuts down on the number of early release days in the school year to about six or seven, Forest said.
“The original draft calendar had 14 or 15 early release days, and they’re immensely disruptive to the programs, so we made that as the trade-off for fewer early release days,” Forest said.
According to Forest, funds included in the recently approved budget for the 2015-2016 school year will be rolled in to fund salary increases under the new contract.
“They wanted to increase the base because we wanted to be more competitive with the area schools. That’s the board’s priority, to attract more teachers,” Forest said.
According to RSU 40 Business Manager Karla Miller, several changes to the salary schedules were made to increase the starting pay for teachers and reduce the number of pay steps.
The base pay was increased by $1,100, and the rest of the pay schedule is calculated by formula, Miller said. The scale was adjusted to include a 2.5 percent increase between steps, and the salary schedule increases by 2.5 percent annually in each of the second two years of the contract as well, she said.
The salary schedule also bumps up starting pay by eliminating the lowest pay step each year.
The change creates a “cluster” of teachers with varying amounts of time teaching for the district.
Teachers in their first and second year are both paid the same second-year salary in the 2015-2016 contract year.
In the 2016-2017 contract year, another pay step will be eliminated and teachers in their first, second, or third year will all get paid the same third-year rate, which will include the first of two annual 2.5 percent increases.
In the 2017-2018 year, a third pay step will be eliminated and teachers in years one through four will all be paid the same rate as a fourth-year teacher, including the second 2.5 percent annual increase.
The plan is to eliminate the cluster for those teachers when the next contract is negotiated and reduce the number of steps in the salary schedule, Miller said.
With the changes, the effect to teachers’ pay is “all over the road” during the first year, but works out to just over a 5 percent increase annually during the second and third years of the contract for those not at either the bottom or top of the schedule, Miller said.
One other change of note involves the length of the school day for the district’s five elementary schools.
Currently the elementary school day is 6.25 hours while the middle and high school have 6.5-hour days; all will be 6.5 hours under the new contract, Miller said.
The new contract goes into effect on Sept. 1.
