Unions consider district’s offer

PALMER — The school district has reached tentative agreements with both of its unions.

Schools Superintendent Ken Burnley said that the district and unions were able to end what had been a stalemate in negotiations by changing the way the district manages its finances.

Negotiations had dragged on for more than a year, he said, because the school board didn’t have a clear picture of the district’s finances. Board members didn’t know what they could offer the unions and thus did the safe thing and offered nothing.

“Now we’re able to show them a comprehensive flow chart to say if you do this it causes that,” Burnley said. “When they saw it they were happy. Very happy. Like, ‘Wow, this is what we’ve needed all along.’”

Indeed, although the break in negotiations came shortly after teachers staged a show of force, wearing yellow t-shirts threatening to strike to a school board meeting, to Burnley that demonstration was, if anything, coincidental. He lays credit for the tentative agreement squarely at the feet of the district’s financial team and his assistant superintendent for business and operations — Ken Forrester in particular.

“We’ll win awards before he’s done here because he’s that good,” Burnley said.

The agreements have not yet been ratified either by the district or by the unions. Burnley said he can’t speak for the unions but it wouldn’t be outside of the realm of possibility to have fully ratified contracts by the end of the month.

And while the negotiations appear to be over, it’s not all good news.

“All parties involved understand that staff reductions will be necessary and are exploring all options to mitigate the impact,” the district wrote in a press release issued Tuesday.

Burnley said there will be reductions in teaching staff, support staff and administrative staff. A lot of that just has to be done.

“Those stimulus dollars, 46 teachers were on that. That was one-time money,” he said. “We were getting less revenue than expenses every year. That’s a structural deficit.”

He said reductions on the order of 3 percent to 4 percent is the ballpark he’s seeing.

“Essentially, our teaching staff, the numbers will go back to what they were a year before this one,” he said.

In a nutshell, here’s what district’s offer:

For both the Classified Employees Association representing support staff and the Mat-Su Education Association representing teachers, there will be a 1.75 percent pay increase the first year and a 2 percent increase the second and third years of the contract. CEA will also be paid a 1 percent lump sum to make up for what they would have gotten in 2009.

The district will hold to the status quo on paying 90 percent of health insurance costs for employees for the first two years of the contract.

“In the third year, both the District and (the unions) have agreed to begin working immediately to address the need to alter our benefit plans to reduce the overall costs to both the district and the employees. To show our commitment to this plan review, the parties agree to split 50/50 any increase in premium from the previous year,” according to the district press release.

Classroom teachers will also see no change to their planning time. Planning time had been something of a sticking point in the negotiations. Teachers say they need the time to prepare lesson plans, grade papers and accomplish tasks they can’t do while class is in session.

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