Both sides in the contentious teacher contract negotiations have been tight-lipped about the terms of the proposed three-year-contract settlement tentatively reached last week. The general membership of the Harvard Teachers Association (HTA) was to have voted whether to ratify the contract terms Thursday, May 24, and the full School Committee is slated to vote on the new contract at its May 29 meeting.
The terms of the new contract were reached after midnight May 17, after a six-and-a-half hour negotiating session. School Superintendent Tom Jefferson said in an interview this week that “the final documents have been written up this week—the language has to be very specific” because the contract has the force of law once both sides sign it. After both parties sign the contract, the teachers and school board will issue a joint press release spelling out the details of the settlement, Jefferson said.
This week, in a closed-door Tuesday evening executive session, the School Committee met with the Board of Selectmen and the Finance Committee to discuss the settlement and its potential ramifications for the town budget and the contract negotiations with other town unions.
The teachers and school board have been negotiating for more than a year and a half, and the teachers have worked since last fall with no contract. To protest the delay, teachers have been working to rule, causing morale at the schools to plummet, in the opinion of many. In interviews late last week, both school board Chairwoman Willie Wickman and HTA representative Kathleen Doherty sounded tired, but relieved that the two groups had finally come to an agreement.
“I wish that it had been sooner, but I am glad that it’s this school year,” Doherty said of the settlement. She thinks it is an agreement both sides can live with, although each side gave up more than it wanted to. “We told our members that it’s the best we could get,” she said. “It’s not that one side won.”
Although the new contract will run for three years, the first year is almost up, she noted. Because the schools and teachers like to start negotiations for a new contract well before the old one ends, the two groups will have only a short respite from negotiations. “We start in the fall of the third year, but we don’t want to see a repeat of this,” Doherty said.
Next year’s school budget does not have funds in it to pay for cost-of-living pay increases for the teachers. In fact, because teachers worked this year under the provisions of the last year of the old contract, the schools will also need to come up with more money to pay for any retroactive increases for this year’s teacher salaries negotiated in the new contract. Each 1 percent increase in cost-of-living for teachers costs the schools roughly $50,000. When asked in the past about where the money for such increases would come from, along with money to fund the unsettled DPW and police union contracts, the school board, selectmen, and Finance Committee have been noncommittal, saying they would figure that out when they know the total amount needed.
