By Natalie De La Garza
Staff Writer
CARIBOU, Maine — Already six months overdue, the contract between the RSU 39 School Board and the teachers’ union has hit further delays — and is on the verge of being referred to the Maine Labor Relations Board.
The problem, according to the Eastern Aroostook Education Association (EA2) which represents the teachers of RSU 39, is that the school board is trying to change a tentative agreement signed by both parties almost a year ago by citing a clerical error. The tentative agreement (TA) in question was signed back in March 2013, according to Lead Negotiator for EA2 Ken Atcheson.
The verbiage was changed in one of the contract’s articles to prevent a scenario where all teachers could use a personal day on the same date.
“The school board looked at it, and they wrote up (the TA) to say that personal days could be taken in that sort of an order, and we looked at it,” Atcheson described. “They put it in print, they signed it, and they passed it to us. We went out and caucused, we came back and signed it to say ‘yes,’” he added, “there was nothing in it about deducting personal days from sick days.”
But that was nearly a year ago.
On Jan. 14, negotiators from both sides met for nearly 14 hours and settled all of the outstanding articles.
“We felt we had everything done and all that was left was the editing — commas, spellings, ranking order to make sure 12 follows 11 and that sort of thing,” Atcheson said. “There were no other major decisions that had to be made.”
Shortly later, RSU officials emailed the contract back to the EA2 negotiators with a message citing that the document included those comma and spelling changes, “and basically ‘oh, we forgot something in Article 12,’” Atcheson described, “They want to pull this article and they’re blaming it on a clerical error on their secretary.”
The “something” forgotten in the proposed contract stipulates that if a teacher were to use a personal day, it would cost them a sick day.
“That is not how the tentative agreement is written,” EA2 officials wrote in a press release. “Instead, what both parties agreed to included language that allows for both sick days and personal days to be used mutually exclusive of each other.”
President of the EA2 , Ryan Drost, has a copy of the tentative agreement and takes exception to the alteration being referred to as a clerical error.
“You can’t go back on your word,” Drost said in the press release. “If you sign the tentative agreement you agree to it — plain and simple.”
The three-year contract, once ratified by all parties, will be in effect until 2016; Drost explained that overall, the teachers lost ground in the new proposed contract.
“We’re not asking for the 2 percent raises that we get, we’re not even getting the rest of our salary for the beginning part of the year,” he said.
The lost salary stems from pay increases that RSU 39’s voters approved last summer with the budget — but those funds have not made their way to the teachers’ paychecks since the contract has yet to be ratified, and those funds are not retroactive.
On January 24, EA2 members voted to ratify the contract as a tentative agreement, “Which is a common practice,” Drost explained.
It wasn’t unanimous, but the teachers ratified the contract that same day — and Atcheson says the school board disagreed with them doing so.
“They even said ‘no, this is not a complete contract,’ — well, no, because we’re ratifying only the changes,” Atcheson said. “Everything else that was in (the contract) stayed the same, so you don’t ratify it.”
The school board met on Feb. 5, but did not take action on the contract; Atcheson said that an email was sent out on Friday, explaining that the board did not take action during the Wednesday meeting because two board members who served on the negotiations committee were absent from the meeting.
“We can’t say what their motives or their plans are, but the longer they delay, the longer they hold onto these teachers salaries,” Atcheson said, referring to the process as bargaining in bad faith. “If this is not resolved in a timely fashion, it will be referred to the Maine Labor Relations Board.”
“This has not been a typical negotiation because we’re putting together a contract that still had remnants of former contracts from the Caribou and Limestone school systems, so there was an unusual large number of negotiations items on the table,” Superintendent Frank McElwain said on late Tuesday afternoon, adding that it has been a long and complicated process.
“On behalf of the board, we’re confident that we’re very close to making a settlement, and we’re confident we’ll get there soon,” he added. “I appreciate the patience of the staff and the community’s understand of what a challenge this has been.”
