Editor’s note: This article is by Matt Hongoltz-Hetling, of the Valley News, in which it was first published Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2015.
[H]ARTFORD — In an effort to overcome what they say is a disadvantage in negotiations with teacher unions, two area school board heads are forming a group that will allow school board negotiators to compare notes and share strategies when crafting new contracts for teachers and support staff.
After months of behind-the-scenes organizing, Hartford School Board Chairwoman Lori Dickerson and Norwich School Board Chairman Neil Odell were scheduled to meet with other organizers for the first time during a closed-door session Tuesday night.
Critics of the idea say that public officials should not be able to meet in secret, while proponents say it will help school board negotiators hold their own against more savvy negotiators on the other side of the table.
“I’ve been doing negotiations now for about six years,” Odell said. “Every year, you sit down to the table and I have no idea, partly my fault, but I have no idea what’s going on in Hartford, or in Thetford, or any of the neighboring districts. But I know the teacher negotiator does. They have a better sense, more information to work on than school boards do.”
Odell isn’t the only school board member who feels outmatched at the bargaining table, according to the Vermont School Boards Association, which is supporting more collaboration among school board negotiators across the state.
“A lot of board members are citizens,” said Nicole Mace, executive director of the VSBA. “They’ve never negotiated before. They don’t like it. These are the teachers that work with their children. It’s not something that they have historically engaged with at the same level that the (Vermont National Education Association) has.”
In a confidential proposal that was obtained by the Valley News through a Freedom of Information Act request, Dickerson and Odell laid out their vision for a newly created Regional Bargaining Council.
“We want to try to rebalance the power structure right now that is, we feel, very much in favor of the union,” Odell said.
Council members would meet over dinner at least once every two months and pool data with a goal toward creating countywide spreadsheets summarizing contract provisions. Each member district would report on the status of its ongoing negotiations, and members also would discuss statewide trends and specific negotiating techniques or other relevant topics.
Tuesday’s meeting was scheduled to include a talk led by professional negotiator Joe Blanchette, who once served as a director in the Vermont National Education Association. Blanchette helped to organize the group, and contributed to the writing of the initial invitation, which was sent out Sept. 17.
Darren Allen, a spokesman for the Vermont National Education Association, which represents 12,000 teaching professionals, said that teacher unions have a similar structure, with bargaining councils in each of seven regions in the state holding monthly meetings to compare notes.
But, Allen said, there is a fundamental reason why union negotiators should be allowed to meet privately, while school board members should not be.
“The stark difference, obviously, is that our people are not elected officials,” Allen said.
Allen said that the teacher unions will not change the basic process by which they protect the interests of their members.
“Regardless of what boards try to do, our local associations negotiate with their local school boards at the bargaining table, and that will continue to be the case,” he said. “The issues at the table are determined in each locality.”
Organizing Behind The Scenes
The email exchanges preceding the meeting indicate that organizers wanted to limit the spread of information about the Regional Bargaining Council and control the manner in which it was presented.
In a Sept. 17 email, Odell questioned whether a board chairperson who also was a teacher should receive the invitation, to which Blanchette responded, “Let’s not start with him/her. But we will need to deal with this.”
Vermont’s open meeting law requires that public officials meet and discuss public business in open session unless the topic of discussion falls under one of the specific exemptions listed in the law. To ensure that the meeting would not be governed by the law, which applies whenever multiple board members discuss public business, organizers invited participants in a way that ensured that multiple members of the same supervisory union’s boards would not be in attendance. At one point, one of two members of the Tunbridge Central School Board who had accepted the original invitation was uninvited; in another case, an invitee was reminded of the confidential nature of the proposal.
When the Valley News asked Dickerson for a copy of the invitation letter, she first responded by providing a summary that she and other organizers jointly had crafted. When the request was repeated, it sparked a discussion among organizers as to whether releasing it was required under the law.
Odell said he didn’t think the process of organizing the meetings had been secretive.
“I didn’t necessarily see it that way,” he said. “Honestly I didn’t want to play it that way, but I wasn’t sure that there was going to be sufficient interest in pursuing this.”
He said the invitation was sent to the school board heads and superintendents of each area school district and supervisory union.
Odell said some of the level of care about who could attend stemmed from a desire to observe the law, not subvert it.
“There’s a level of scrutiny placed on school boards that the NEA doesn’t have, so we have to make sure we’re following the law,” he said.
He turned down a request by a Valley News reporter to attend the meeting.
“It wouldn’t be appropriate. This is an exploratory meeting,” he said. “It’s not a board committee meeting.”
When considering whether the meeting of school board negotiators should be public, the relevant question is whether the meeting of school board negotiators had been sanctioned by any particular school board, which would subject it to open meeting requirements, Deputy Secretary of State Chris Winters said in an email response to the Valley News.
Still, Winters said, in general, meetings by public officials should be held openly unless there is a good reason not to.
“We always advise board members to err on the side of openness, assume that the open meeting law applies, and warn and carry out their work in a public forum,” he said.
Odell said the meeting met that standard.
“It’s a group of like-minded individuals,” he said. “It’s not a board-sanctioned event. It’s not a board-sponsored event.”
Future Uncertain
Odell and Mace said it’s too early to know whether the idea of Regional Bargaining Councils will catch on — in the Upper Valley or elsewhere in the state.
Mace said that the initiative is part of a larger effort on the part of the VSBA to respond to calls from members for help with negotiations.
The issue is even more important now, she said, because with 80 percent of education costs going to salaries and benefits, many districts are feeling the crunch created by the restrictive spending thresholds imposed under Act 46, an education reform bill that became law earlier this year, as they implement already-negotiated salary and wage increases.
She said that beefing up school boards’ negotiating prowess also could result in the ability to change not only compensation, but also the workplace environments that have become standard.
“Boards are under tremendous pressure to get a handle on cost per student …,” she said. “There’s also a growing understanding that many of these contracts were initially negotiated 30 or 40 years ago and the structure of those contracts doesn’t really work for delivering a 21st-century education, as far as what the time of day school starts, when it ends, and what a classroom looks like.”
Odell said he anticipated fewer than 10 attendees to the meeting, but said that would be a good starting point.
“We’ll have to see what the level of interest is,” he said.
