by: Will Hastings
The recent emergency school board meeting concerning the teachers contract has raised a lot of questions concerning the make up and workings of the proposed contract.
In proposed two year contract teachers would have seen no pay increases the first year. In the second year there were three possibilities of pay increase. Longevity is the first possible option, for teachers who had reached their maximum step, meaning that they cannot advance further with continuing their education or with pay increases. They would have been rewarded with a one-time cost of living adjustment. The second option is to move up in step, which essentially represents a pay increase. The third option is if a teacher did not get a positive increase from either of the previous options they would have received a one time cost of living adjustment of around five hundred dollars.
Additionally teachers would have had the option to take either continuing education classes or use one thousand dollars (about the cost of a class at UNH) that is already set aside in a fund and use it to purchase a laptop. Mrs. Charron, a special education teacher at Hopkinton as well as a member of the contract negotiation team, said, “The idea behind this is to help get laptops into the hands of all teachers.” This is important in a world where technology is increasingly used in classroom education.
In order to become eligible the teachers would have been selected in a lottery system and only a certain amount of teachers would be able to access these funds each year. In addition they needed be able to show how they will use it to further their teaching and classroom experiences.
The laptops would have remained the property of the school district for three years, and after that the computers would have became the teacher’s property. It is not clear if programs downloaded onto the computers would remain on the computers, if the teachers were to leave the district.
The contract stated that if teachers do not call in sick during the school year they would receive a check equivalent to 2½ days pay. This would have worked out to being cheaper than the cost of paying a substitute teacher to come in for the same amount of time.
Had this contract been passed it would have caused about a 21-cent increase per one thousand dollars in taxes. This would have been the “smallest tax increase in a long time,” according to Mrs. Charron.
Mrs. Charron as well as many of her fellow co-workers believed that the article published in the Concord Monitor may have led to the confusion of many voters at the meeting. As well, an un-clear understanding of the Evergreen law may have had its own negative effects. The Evergreen Law is a state law, which states the unions working without a contact will follow the same conditions as their previous contract if it was established before 2008. “Many voters may have had the idea that, if there is no contract then there are no bonus, this is simply not true,” said Charron. Some voters feel that “Evergreen is taking away the towns right to local government”.
Having an outdated contract dissuades teachers from remaining in the district as well as scares new teachers from coming to work in the district.
“It’s hard to listen to how people think teachers are being greedy and selfish,” said Charron, “but many of the teachers affected live in Hopkinton and pay the same taxes as the voters.”
