[R]UTLAND — The city school board has declared an impasse in its contract negotiations with the union that represents teachers.
The union, meanwhile, said it’s willing to continue negotiating and is asking the board to come back to the table.
The school board, in a statement Wednesday, said the sticking points revolve around economic issues, such as salary increases and health insurance premiums.
The board said it has proposed a 4.76 percent average increase in teachers’ salaries for each of the next four years. Both sides said the union has not presented a salary proposal yet.
The board said it has also offered to continue paying 87 percent of health care premiums.
The Rutland Education Association includes teachers and other licensed staff, but not administrators. The board and union started negotiations Jan. 12 and have met eight times.
The current contract expires July 1.
“The School Board’s declaration of impasse shifts the effort from the negotiation phase to
mediation and, if necessary, fact-finding steps, which can assist the parties in reaching a final agreement in a timely fashion,” the board’s statement read.
The statement added, “The financial positions of (the school board) and the REA seem far apart, which means that progress toward a full and fair resolution of the financial aspects of this contract cannot occur without outside help.”
The board, at its meeting Tuesday night, voted to declare the negotiations at impasse.
Ellen Green, the Rutland Education Association president, said the move by the board effectively shuts down negotiations.
“This is shocking and disturbing — we had been making progress, and this is a huge disappointment,” Green wrote in a letter to union members.
“You may very well hear that they offered us great things and we turned them down — they were already spreading that word before we even began to discuss salary and health care, and we haven’t even been able to present our salary proposal to them yet.”
Green added that the REA is willing to continue negotiations.
“It’s unfortunate and disappointing that the school board has decided to walk away rather than keep talking,” she said in a statement. “The members of the REA remain committed to reaching an agreement that is fair for our community, our schools, our educators and, most importantly, our students.”
Dick Courcelle, president of the Rutland City School Board, said Wednesday that after the eight meetings with the union, the two sides didn’t seem to be getting any closer to resolving their differences.
“Rather than continuing what we felt was not going to be a fruitful outcome,” he said, “we thought we would use this particular process of impasse to advance the negotiations to the next stage.”
The school board said its proposal to raise teachers’ salaries came with a request for more workdays.
“(The school board) recognizes that teachers and other professional salaries are lower in the district’s schools compared to some other school districts in Rutland County, so that some catching up is warranted,” according to the board’s statement. “While doing so, (the board) also proposed increasing the number of workdays for these professionals from 185 to 190. The REA has objected to the additional days and has made no response to the salary increase.”
Regarding health insurance premiums, the school board said it is proposing to pay the same percentage of the premium as it currently does, 87 percent, with the employee covering the remaining 13 percent.
The board, according to its statement, has also proposed creating and partly funding health savings accounts to cover employees’ out-of-pocket costs such as deductibles.
The REA, according to the school board statement, wants the district to pay 90 percent of the health insurance premium, leaving teachers to cover 10 percent. Also, the school board statement said, the union wants the district to create health reimbursement accounts to cover 100 percent of out-of-pocket expenses, including deductibles.
Darren Allen, a spokesperson for the Vermont chapter of the National Education Association, referred specific questions on the Rutland negotiations to Green, the local union leader.
He did say that all of the more than 150 teachers’ union contracts in the state expire June 30, and so far about 10 have reached settlements.
Teachers will be moving to new, less expensive health care plans Jan. 1 because of the Affordable Care Act. Gov. Phil Scott has proposed taking that opportunity to shift negotiations over teachers’ health benefits from the local to the state level. He has said a statewide contract would lower property taxes by up to $26 million by capturing some of the savings from the change in plans.
Opponents of that proposal say it violates a union’s collective bargaining rights.
Scott has pledged a veto of the state budget passed by the Legislature, which does not include a provision calling for a state-level health insurance contract for teachers.
Courcelle said the Rutland school district has proposed keeping the premium split at its current level due to “significant” and “dramatic” changes in the health insurance landscape, allowing time to see how it continues to develop.
“We basically want to hold the line,” he said.
Green, in her letter to union members, wrote that with an impasse both sides need to agree on a mediator or fact-finder, which might take some time and may not be easy.
“With every contract in the state up for negotiations (only a few have settled),” she wrote, “mediators/fact finders are in short supply, as are possible dates.”
