[B]URLINGTON — Negotiations between the city’s teachers and the school board are set to resume this week, after mediation earlier this year failed to produce a new contract.
A fact-finding report by a hearing officer in the stalled contract talks between the Burlington School Board and the Burlington Education Association is expected to be delivered Monday.
The report won’t be public until Aug. 25, but it will form the basis for renewed negotiations as the board and teachers union try to reconcile differences over compensation and health care costs.
The two sides declared an impasse in February, and a mediation session in March failed to yield a compromise. At a hearing in June, the board and the union presented their cases to the mutually agreed upon fact finder.
Burlington teachers’ current three-year contract ends Aug. 31. Thirty days after the fact-finding report is delivered to the two sides, the board will have the option to impose contract terms, and teachers will have the option to strike in response.
They’re trying to negotiate a one-year contract. A federal excise tax on high-value health plans, which is expected to take effect in 2018, will upend current teacher health plans across the state.
The board says growth in teacher compensation is unsustainable, outpacing wage growth for the region and driving up education property taxes beyond what residents can afford.
Stephanie Seguino, board vice chair, said public-sector workers have been largely shielded from the wage stagnation that followed the Great Recession.
“The continued salary increases that existed throughout the 2000s in the public sector just are no longer palatable because most households, since 2008, have seen little or no wage growth,” Seguino said.
The board wants to do away with the district’s current salary schedule grid, which gives teachers annual “step increases” in pay based on seniority and graduate courses. The board is instead offering a 1.8 percent increase in salaries for the year covered by the contract.
Fran Brock, newly elected BEA president, declined to comment on the specifics of the negotiations, citing “respect for the collective bargaining process.”
“We’re hopeful that something positive will come out of all this, and we’ll get a fair contract, a contract that’s fair to teachers, to students and to Burlington families,” Brock said.
The BEA has said the board is reneging on a commitment to keep Burlington teacher salaries at the “middle of the middle” for teachers in Chittenden County. The union is looking to keep the step increases and asking for a 5.7 percent increase in salaries, according to the board.
Seguino said the “middle of the middle” provision in the previous contract was bad policy and rising salaries contributed to voters’ rejection of the 2014 school budget.
The provision “abdicates responsibility” for a teacher contract Burlington residents can afford by allowing contracts in surrounding districts to set the pay for Burlington teachers, Seguino said. Many of those districts draw from a wealthier tax base, she added.
In the current contract, Burlington teachers received annual 3.5 percent pay increases, but when combined with the step increases, some teachers received annual raises of nearly 7 percent, according to Seguino.
The minimum starting salary for Burlington teachers is currently $41,892, and the median salary is $71,624. Of the district’s 418 teachers, 110 make more than $80,000, according to figures from the board.
Average annual pay for all fields in the Burlington-South Burlington metropolitan statistical area in 2015 was $46,060, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Seguino said the board is willing to increase the raise it’s offering if the union will accept other cost containment measures, such as increasing the portion of health insurance premiums teachers pay or renegotiating how graduate courses affect pay increases. Currently teachers pay 15 percent of their health premiums, which the board wants to increase to 19 percent.
The union has not agreed to either of those measures, Seguino said.
