No easy answers

It seems like every other month or so we call one or the other unions representing school district employees, and every time we hear the same thing about contract negotiations.

There is nothing new to report.

At most school board meetings we have attended and nearly every Mat-Su Borough Assembly meeting, either Rick Byrnes, head of the Classified Employees Association, or Jill Showman, head of the Mat-Su Education Association, is present. Sometimes both are. Byrnes will usually speak, beginning his remarks with a running tally of days his members have gone without a contract. That total stands at more than 400 as of this writing.

No one likes to see negotiations drag on this long, but there doesn’t seem to be a clear resolution here.

The unions both say they aren’t asking for anything outlandish. Both say they’re willing to compromise if the district will. But the district’s negotiating team takes its marching orders from the school board, which has approved no changes to its initial offer.

When CEA went to arbitration this spring, the arbiter sided strongly with the district, noting an extremely fragile financial situation that could spiral out of control with even the slightest of pay increases.

For a lot of organizations, payroll isn’t as much of a concern as it is for the district. The vast majority of district funds are expended on personnel costs. An increase in personnel costs of a percentage point or two therefore means an almost identical change in the district’s overall budget.

There’s not a lot of wiggle room there.

But while the district says it has no money, it always seems to be able to pull together funds when it wants to. It was able, for instance, to bring custodians in house and pay the cost to do so. We have some sympathy with the union if it believes the district’s cries of penury amount to crocodile tears.

The consensus on the school board seems to be that teachers come first. Education is the district’s business, after all, so if at budget time there is a choice between a teaching position or a position providing some other service, the school board tends to favor the teacher — or at least that is the claim.

So we’ll be watching with interest what, if anything, that means for the arbitration the district entered this week with the MSEA teachers’ union. If teachers come first, maybe they’ll have an easier time squeezing concessions from the district than the janitors, secretaries and aides of CEA did.

All of this could be solved if the borough would, as Byrnes has long advocated, fund its school district to the maximum level it is allowed by law. But it’s always a trade-off and the concomitant reductions in borough services would likely be painful.

In the end we wind up turning that old saw of local governance — everyone wants good schools, good roads and good service, but no one wants to pay for them.

We feel the district is probably telling the truth when it says it can’t afford to bump its union contracts much more, especially in this financial climate. At the same time, we also wonder if the district is running as lean and mean as possible at the administrative level. Could an across-the-board reduction — even just a couple percent — in the administrative budget be funneled back into local classrooms?

Our hope is a settlement can be reached short of something dramatic. As most parents of school-age children know, a strike or walk-out is the last thing anybody wants.