Talks stalled

PALMER — One of the Mat-Su Borough School District’s two labor unions is set to head to contract arbitration today but neither union says it has seen any compromise coming from the district.

“The teachers have been willing to work with the district,” said Jill Showman, president of the Mat-Su Education Association, which represents district teachers. “We’ve not seen any movement on the part of the district.”

She said the union is seeking two things in its negotiations with the district — better salary and health insurance and to keep teachers’ “planning time” as is.

She said the union has already made concessions on health care — they’ve switched plans to save money — and that planning time is a huge piece of the contract. Planning time refers to hours in the day when teachers can talk to colleagues or make contact with parents. Now, a lot of teachers have that time during the school day, either between classes at the high school level or when students are at music or gym class on the elementary level.

“The district, per their proposal, could allow for their planning time to be 30 minutes before students arrive and 30 minutes after they leave, when teachers don’t have contact with kids,” she said.

Showman said she is hopeful something can be worked out today or Wednesday. But if the experience of her colleague Rick Byrnes with the Classified Employees Association is any indication, there’s not a lot of reason for hope.

CEA represents anyone who’s not a teacher or administrator in the district — custodians, secretaries and aides.

“We’ve given them three offers after our initial offer and they’ve given us none,” Byrnes said of the CEA negotiations with the school district. “We originally started in February of ’09 bargaining. We bargained all of ’09 and into ’10, and we went to arbitration in the spring.”

All told, he said, that’s around 460 days without a contract. In the interim, his union members have worked under the old contract.

“We are at this point in time in a status quo from last year, which was a status quo from the year before,” Byrnes said.

The district has said in the past that the holdup has to do with custodians hired after the school board voted to end its contract with NANA Management Services. CEA wants to bring those employees up to the same level they would have been at had they worked for the district during the outsourcing period.

For his part, Byrnes disputes that, saying that the janitors are just 100 of his 700 members and therefore aren’t a big enough of a problem to have caused negotiations to break down.

Arbitration didn’t go very well for CEA. The arbitrator found in his decision that the district simply couldn’t afford any pay raises for CEA members and that CEA should accept a cut in its health benefits.

As the year rolled by, CEA held protests outside of school board meetings and, this spring, instituted a “work to contract” policy of asking its members not to work any overtime. That policy has since expired.

“It was thought that starting out the year with a new superintendent and new administration, that that would not be a fair way to start,” Byrnes said. “That honeymoon period is about to be over.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.