Harvard’s educators are now working under contract, after 20 months without one. The School Committee voted unanimously Tuesday night to ratify a three-year, retroactive contract between the committee and the Harvard Teachers Association (HTA). The teachers’ union voted to ratify the agreement last week “by a comfortable margin,” according to Kathleen Doherty, HTA negotiating team leader.
On Wednesday this week, Doherty said that the “teachers suspended work-to-rule as of Thursday, May 17, the day after the tentative agreement was reached. Once the contract was ratified [by the HTA] on May 24, work-to-rule was officially ended.” The teachers “had very reluctantly made the decision to go to work-to-rule and worked hard at every step of the process to reach a settlement so that work-to-rule could be ended as soon as possible,” Doherty said. “We wish that day had come much sooner, but in any event, it has finally come, and we are relieved.”
The term of the new contract is from September 1, 2006, to August 31, 2009, and includes a 1 percent cost-of-living adjustment effective September 1, 2006, with an additional 0.5 percent increase “halfway through the school year.” The teachers will receive a 3 percent cost-of-living adjustment in each of the remaining two years, FY2008 and 2009. Doherty said Wednesday that the new contract does not change the teachers’ salary steps.
Beginning September 1, 2007, the health insurance cost-sharing formula, one of the sticking points in the contract negotiations, will be 80:20, with the town paying 80 percent of the cost and the teachers contributing 20 percent. The previous contract’s 90:10 split will be in effect until the end of August. “In exchange for the change in health insurance cost-sharing,” School Committee Chairwoman Willie Wickman stated in a press release this week, “an offset of $500 will be added to the salary schedule in the second and third years of the contract. Both sides are relieved to have reached a settlement and look forward to working together in the years ahead.”
Harvard’s finance director, Lorraine Leonard, said Wednesday that the terms of the contract settlement translate into an additional $70,000 that must be raised to pay for the retroactive cost-of-living adjustments for the current fiscal year (FY2007). And for FY08, which begins July 1, additional funding will be needed, she said, because the FY08 budget approved at March’s Annual Town Meeting was based on the status quo. She explained that the town’s decreased health-insurance share will save the town $100,000 from what was budgeted at Town Meeting. However, the 3 percent cost-of-living increase for teachers in FY08 ($170,000) and the $500 per-teacher health-insurance offset ($46,000) must be added, resulting in a net shortfall of approximately $116,000 from what was budgeted at Town Meeting.
While declining to go into the specifics of the give-and-take during the year and a half of negotiations, Doherty said this week, “I think it’s very fair to say that both sides gave up things that they wanted so that a contract settlement could be reached.”
