What may have been the longest-running contract negotiation in the state has resulted in a settlement. Negotiations began back in 2005, and both sides saw changes in their negotiating teams during the following four years.

The TimesLeader.com news article says that contracts terms are being withheld pending development of exact contract language (a process that can actually take a couple of months during a summer period when the people who need to sign off can be hard to reach).

It’s always good to see a settlement, and this one should be interesting. It would also be interesting how the Office of Open Records would rule in response to a request for release of the tentative agreement. The law exempts “pre-decisional” documents from mandatory disclosure. But when two parties announce that they have reached agreement on substantive matters — e.g., percentage increases in salary, healthcare cost-sharing and the number of steps in a salary schedule — are those written agreements “pre-decisional” because they have not yet been inserted into a final contract?

What do most of us who serve on public school boards have in common with the big, fast and highly paid athletes of the National Football League?  Unfortunately, it’s neither muscle nor money. It’s naivete about the business we’re in.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a great piece about DeMaurice Smith, new head of the NFL Players Association (union). Mr. Smith, a Washington lawyer, educates players about the basic economics of professional football. Although the jocks he represents usually have college degrees, they know next to nothing about the business side of their sport. That means they won’t know what to ask for, or how to hang together, in contract negotiations with League owners.

Mr. Smith, elected in March to replace the late Gene Upshaw and lead the NFL Players Association, then asks how many players saw the news about the league’s new deal with DirecTV, which guarantees teams an additional $4 billion through 2014. They didn’t. He asks how many of the league’s new and renovated stadiums were paid for with tax dollars. They shake their heads in disbelief when he gives them the answer–virtually all of them.

And here’s a big part of the problem from the NFLPA perspective.

The short length of the average player’s career—just over three seasons —and the league’s annual turnover rate of about 30% also make it difficult for the NFLPA to develop consistent leadership among players.

“The re-education process is a constant battle,” said Jeff Kessler, who was a close friend of Mr. Upshaw’s and is the chief labor counsel for both the NFL and NBA players unions. “You have to start over every year, and you hope some of the veterans bring the newcomers along.”

Where union negotiations are concerned, professional football is the mirror image of Pennsylvania public education — with one big difference. In public education, it’s the owners and their elected representatives who almost never have the same depth of experience as the union negotiators. In fact, the last time I checked, the average tenure of school board members across the Commonwealth was just about three years. By contrast, negotiators for PSEA and AFT-PA are professionals, carefully trained and backed by a statewide database on recent contract terms, district-by-district. Even when boards choose to be represented by professionals at the bargaining table, they don’t know how to respond to a union media blitz when a strike is threatened.

The Pennsylvania School Boards Association no doubt thinks it has its hands full lobbying for more money while fending off the latest and greatest schemes of the Governor and legislature for “reforming” education at long distance. But two tasks that the state decision-makers are more than happy to leave to local boards are negotiating union contracts and then raising taxes to pay for them. Finding more effective ways to “bring the newcomers along” needs to move up higher on the PSBA priority list.

The judge who last week removed 8 of 9 school board members in the North Schuykill School District has written an opinion explaining that he did so because they knowingly violated the Pennsylvania school code in appointing a superintendent.  It seems that they selected the board solicitor as “acting superintendent” and made little effort to find someone meeting the statutory requirements for the job, which include a master’s degree in education and at least six years teaching experience.

At some point the board sought “mandate waivers” (exceptions to the rule) from the Pennsylvania Department of Education. PDE has not acted on them according to the news story link above.

This is a strange story that I’ll try to learn more about. In a nutshell a judge acted on a petition from 54 Schuykill County residents by removing eight members of a nine-member school board.

The most recent report is that the judge appointed four more members (candidates who were on both party ballots after the spring primary). It takes five members to pass a budget, which has to be done by the end of this month.

Previously, the single board member who wasn’t removed by the judge had said he’d show up for a previously scheduled public meeting. Good for him. Meanwhile, until his new colleagues can be sworn in, he’d better not talk to himself. He could be deemed in violation of the Sunshine Act.

The Southern Lehigh SD approved a new 3-year contract with it’s union on Monday evening.  An article in the Morning Call outlines the details as follows:

The agreement averts a strike and will increase teacher salaries 3.8 percent in each year, including annual seniority-based service increments for teachers with fewer than 15 years of service.

Educators with 15 or more years of service, who are not eligible for the increments, will receive annual pay increases of only 1.78 percent, 1.62 percent and 1.78 percent.

Although prescription co-payments will change slightly over the course of the new contract, medical premium co-payments and benefits remain unchanged.

It appears Southern Lehigh SD has reached a tentative contract agreement with its union according to an article in the Morning Call. A vote on the new 3-year contract will be on the Board’s agenda for Monday, June 22, 2009. Currently, no details or comments about the proposed agreement have been released. The contract was set to expire this summer.

The school board and teachers union of Northwest Area school district (Luzerne County) have one of those disagreements that seems likely to have to be settled in court.  The Pennsylvania Department of Education has filed for an injunction against an end-of-the-year strike on the grounds that there are no longer enough days before June 30 to squeeze in the 180 days of instruction time required by state law. The Times Leader article on the case gives an admirably succinct summary of the issues:

Northwest teachers went on strike in November and stayed out for the maximum number of days before returning to work. The School Board then approved a new school calendar that kept most planned vacation days intact, and pushed the final day of school to June 23. Snow days pushed it to June 30. As a result, there are no more scheduled days off that could be used to make up for days lost because of a second strike.

The union has argued that such calendar changes – adopted by several school districts in recent years following a first strike — are a deliberate effort to skirt the labor law and deny teachers their right to a second strike. Northwest School Board members and their solicitor, Richard Galtman, have denied that.

I’m late in drawing attention to a website from a group called the Great Valley Stakeholders.  The site monitors the Great Valley School District (Chester County), covering a wide range of school governance issues: apparent conflicts of interest, elections and, of course, the union contracts.  In addition to summaries, you can see the a summary of the current union contract, accompanied by a link to the full text of that contract.

The Great Valley district was the first to make my Transparency Honor Roll, based on the overall clarity of the budgetary information on its website. It’s pretty clear that the Great Valley Stakeholders would think I set the bar too low. I took another look at the district site and still think it’s good — certainly compared to those of about nine out of ten Pennsylvania districts. But I acknowledge that posting lots of data isn’t helpful if it’s posted after the decisions are made.

Not incidentally, this is a very affluent district. Per-student annual expenditures are over $18,000. By the end of the recently approved contract the highest-paid teachers will be making over $100,000 and new hires over $50,000. The Great Valley Stakeholders don’t sound outraged about high salaries per se. What ticks them off is that it’s possible for teachers to get “unsatisfactory” ratings and still benefit from negotiated pay raises that apply to their positions on the salary scale.

A marathon negotiating session between Saucon Valley SD and its union yielded one very important outcome. The teachers have agreed not to strike for the remainder of the year, thus allowing the students to finish their school year on Thursday as scheduled. A brief update can be found in today’s Morning Call.

At least a few school districts are negotiating tougher contract terms, sometimes after what sounds like healthy dialogue with local unions, according to the Morning Call.com.

One paragraph in the article illustrate why the public is often confused by conflicting claims about the magnitude of pay increases.

Salisbury Township’s union and school board decided in April to buy time with a one-year deal that awards teachers 1 percent pay hikes, plus annual service-based increases for those who haven’t hit the top of the seniority scale. That will increase the district’s teacher pay costs 2.8 percent.

Understanding salary schedules isn’t all that hard. The “1 percent” here applies to increases in the value of steps on the salary scale, and the “2.8 percent” reflects how many teachers are getting automatic seniority-based pay increases. Confusion arises only when teachers and the public ignore seniority-based pay raises, as if they were a fact of nature, like the year-after-year growth of tree rings. Boards can’t afford to think like that.

Pennsylvania school districts have 15-20 annual steps on their salary scale, but some have as few as 10. In districts where most teachers have taught for fewer than 15-20 years, annual pay raises (the jargon term is “step movement”) are likely to be more costly than percentage increases in the size of each step. By contrast, if most teachers are already at the top of the scale, the percentage increase in the size of each step, especially at the top level, becomes the big point at issue.