January 7, 2019
By Christina Li and Daisy Li
Quite a few Lexington High School educators sport a yellow pin that reads “Teacher working conditions are student learning conditions.” These pins are part of a recent debate about the working conditions and salaries of teachers in the Lexington School District. Just before winter break, some of these concerns were resolved in a new contract.
Every labor union has a contract with employers concerning working conditions. By state law, the employer-worker contract of the public sector union expires and must be revisited at least every three years.
The Lexington Education Association has four contracts: one for the professional educators (teachers), one for the instructional aides, one for the secretarial staff, and one for technology workers. These contract negotiations were only for Unit A, the teachers’ contract.
“Contracts evolve over decades. [They frame] the relationship between the worker and employer. Every three years, you go back and relook at it and say is this working, is it not, and what can we do to fix the fact that our realities have changed in the past three years?”, Dr. Avon Lewis, the president of the LEA, said.
The previous contract expired on Sept. 1, 2018. Beginning in January of 2018, School Committee representatives and the LEA met on multiple occasions to present their respective concerns and visions for a future contract.
“The more students we have, the harder it is to know all of them as well and therefore what their needs are… A big concern is special education. People who have more severe disabilities have the highest needs from their teachers. As those populations have grown, the number of people we’ve hired has not kept pace,” Laura Sheppard-Brick, LHS math teacher and high school representative on the negotiating team, said.
The LEA negotiating team comprises Dr. Lewis, at least one representative from every Lexington Public School and several special educators. The School Committee's negotiating team consisted of a member of the School Committee, the superintendent, central office staff and principals. The LEA and the School Committee were unable to come to a mutual agreement at the end of the 2017-2018 year, thus carrying the negotiations into the first semester of the 2018-2019 year.
A sticking point was how much of the district’s budget would be devoted to hiring more staff.
“Teachers came in with a number of proposals that were expensive. The single biggest line in district’s budget is payroll: paying people who come here to work. We [the teachers] were advocating for looking at staffing. The School Committee didn’t want to spend that money,” Dr. Lewis said.
After months of negotiations, the vote to ratify the contract happened in the week before break. Both the School Committee and the union voted to accept the contract.
“There’s actually two contracts, one that runs just for this year and one that runs for the three years after that. Some of the things that we agreed on will be put into place this year, and other things will be put into place next year, such as staffing and scheduling,” Sheppard-Brick said.
The new contract ameliorated some of the concerns regarding special education teachers.
“There was a lot of movement on the special ed concerns: some staffing increases that are immediate and [there was] a pretty serious commitment to continually look at issues of overwork and equity,” Sheppard-Brick said.
However, concerns regarding counselors and core subject teachers remain, and will be discussed in a working group over the next few years.
“There was a more measured response to the counseling issues… We brought some ideas to the table, but they were prohibitively expensive. There is a commitment from both sides for this to get addressed in the next contract,” Sheppard-Brick said.
Sheppard-Brick was optimistic about future negotiations.
“Negotiation with Dr. Hackett was a very positive experience… My experience negotiating changed significantly in this year, when Dr. Hackett came on board. She was really committed to hearing teachers’ concerns in a way that previous negotiators were not,” Sheppard-Brick said.
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