A Contract Worse Than the QEO

New Richmond teachers begin every school day by walking into their buildings en masse to demonstrate solidarity and abide by a "work to the contract" job action.

By Bill Hurley

As if the “club” of the QEO law isn’t enough, the New Richmond School Board is now manipulating the arbitration system to whack its teachers while they’re down and impose an even worse contract on them.

Worse than a Qualified Economic Offer? That’s right, say members of the New Richmond unit of the West Central Education Association. They are aghast that their school board would take such drastic steps to undermine their contract – and are fighting back.

If the board succeeds, New Richmond teachers will not only fall further behind in salary, they will lose the one benefit that has kept them from leaving the district in droves – an attractive retirement plan that was negotiated more than 20 years ago.

“They (school board members) see an adversarial bargain and the path to arbitration as a way to attack our retirement benefit,” said Kerry Kittle, a high school history teacher who is the union’s legislative representative. “This action is hurting staff members and it is hurting education in this community. There is no question about it.”

An abuse of arbitration
At a time when the district faces a budget deficit and health care costs are skyrocketing, the district is moving toward taking its 2001-03 teacher contract to arbitration. In this environment, they believe they can convince an arbitrator that the district can no longer afford the generous retirement benefit. The benefit provides retirees with a stipend equal to 25% of their average salary for the last five years of employment in the district, full insurance until Medicare kicks in and another 12% in a fund of their choice.

Although that is admittedly an attractive benefit, union leaders are quick to point out that there are strict guidelines for who qualifies and it was maintained in the contract for 20 years by making long-term concessions in the salary schedule.

Now, the board is ignoring those trade-offs and focusing on retirement.

Ironically, it is using arbitration – the very system that teachers throughout the state have long supported – to try to eliminate the benefit.

“If we had been allowed to go to arbitration in any of the last seven years, we certainly could have increased our wages and benefits,” said Brett Pickerign, UniServ director at the West Central Education Association. “But the board chose not to. We can’t decide when to go to arbitration. Only the school board can.
“They just waited for this particular time. They selected their time very carefully,” Pickerign said. “The law is unjust. It’s just not fair that the district can choose the time and place for arbitration.”

New Richmond is believed to be only the third school district to go to arbitration since the Qualified Economic Offer law was passed in 1993. (The other two were Richland Center and Madison. In 1996, Madison Teachers Inc. won a $4.9 million arbitration award.)

The New Richmond district apparently believes it may have a good arbitration case, Pickerign said, because arbitrators are required by law to put top priority on the impact of revenue controls on a district. The district believes the deficit and rising health costs may give it the ammunition it needs to go after the retirement package. The district chose to abandon the district’s traditional consensus bargaining model in favor of the arbitration approach.

Demonizing teachers
District Administrator James Wold began seeking community support for this strategy in January of 2001. Wold appeared at community functions with a presentation that used worst-case scenarios and essentially blamed teachers and their retirement plan for the district’s financial problems,
Pickerign said.

“The administration, from the very beginning, started to demonize teachers rather than work with them,” he said. “The superintendent told the community that the retirement benefit would bankrupt the district in several years.”

That’s when the teachers began fighting back, said local association President Matt Friedl, an 8th-grade American history teacher.

“It’s been awe-inspiring,” he said of the involvement of teachers, support staff, parents and citizens.

“A number of parents have called to ask what they can do to help,” said Cheryl Laux, a negotiator and middle school math teacher.

Grassroots organizing
In fact, Kittle said, it was the grassroots membership, not the local union leadership, who drove each other to action.

“This was fueled by membership, and the leadership then found a plan,” he said. “Usually it works the other way around. This was sparked by widespread frustration.”

Union members put together a carefully crafted plan of action, which has been carried out throughout the school year, Friedl said.
The strategy is built on a positive tone. It includes letters to the local papers, mass mailings to the community and “Let’s Talk” buttons that placed the focus on the goal of getting back to the bargaining table. Finally, beginning March 27, after all other avenues had been exhausted, a “work to the contract” job action was implemented.

“This was the very last straw. Nobody likes doing it,” Friedl said, and it was only implemented after the union notified the community and carefully laid out the reasons for it.

Under the job action, teachers are refusing to perform any duties not specifically required by the contract, which means they have resigned from voluntary committees, are refusing to attend non-contracted meetings and limit their work hours to those specifically required in the contract.

The staff meet every morning near the student drop-off zones outside their schools and walk into the buildings en masse just prior to the school starting time.

Also in April, with the large majority of the membership attending, the union unanimously passed a vote of no confidence in Wold, who has been district administrator since 1993.

“Can you imagine the level of frustration that indicates?” Kittle asked.

Negotiations stalled
Currently, the negotiations are in mediation, and the next mediation session is scheduled for May 30. The district has requested that talks move from mediation to arbitration, but the union feels there is still much to talk about at the bargaining table.

The union has signed on to the WEAC Statewide Bargaining Goals, which call for 3.4% per-cell salary increases and no take-backs, but has expressed a willingness to talk about options. For example, one approach to solving the retirement issue is to find a better way for the district to fund it, possibly through a segregated investment fund rather than by using general operating revenues every year.

“We want to find a way to save them money in how they fund it but not decrease the value to teachers,” Pickerign said.

He said the union has requested insurance cost information from the district, but that is “slow in coming.”

Retirement benefit cut off
In an action that further angered teachers, the board said it would no longer provide the retirement benefit to its teachers because the provision expired at the end of the last negotiated contract in July of 2001. That means teachers who retired this year were denied a benefit for which they had made salary concessions throughout their careers. The union has filed grievances over that action by the board.

“Many teachers stayed here with the promise of that benefit,” Kittle said.

The last proposal put on the table by the board includes large increases in employee co-pays for health insurance premiums and prescriptions. If implemented, union officials say, it would require teachers to return half the step increase they received last summer, or about $450 each. Teachers who did not qualify for a step increase would get no pay raise because the retirement benefit (assuming it is maintained) and the increase in health costs would eat up the 3.8% increase.

In fact, teachers could face actual pay cuts. “We don’t know because we haven’t negotiated salary yet,” Friedl said.

One hopeful development is that three newcomers were elected to the school board this spring, and one is a former teacher. But nobody knows what the impact of that will be.

A district in decline
As the negotiations linger, teacher frustration grows and morale declines.

Clark White, an elementary guidance counselor and member of the negotiations team, said New Richmond was a “wonderful district” when he arrived 23 years ago.

“In the last 10 years or so, it has just disintegrated, and it’s now a terrible place to work” he said. “The district administrator has caused a lot of problems.”

“He’s not a unifier; he’s a divider,” added Kittle.

During District Administrator Wold’s tenure, New Richmond teacher salaries have fallen from near the top of area districts to the “middle of the pack,” Pickerign said.

The community expressed its dissatisfaction with school leadership last fall by defeating a referendum to exceed revenue controls for general operating expenses.

Kittle contrasts New Richmond’s decline with nearby Hudson, where the school board and administration support their teachers. In Hudson, district officials helped pass a community referendum that provided additional money for staff salaries.

“Here, they take highly speculative data, cast it in the worst light and attack their teachers as greedy. It’s like night and day,” Kittle said. “As a result, Hudson is on the rise, and we are losing teachers.”

Friedl said people used to look forward to working in the New Richmond School District.

“New Richmond used to be one of the premier districts in the northwest, and it’s disheartening to see it lose its reputation,” Friedl said.

There is no end in sight, union leaders said. The unanimously-approved union motion authorizes the “work to the contract” job action until a signed, voluntary contract is reached. That could easily go through the summer, when many teachers typically are involved in voluntary professional development activities, and into next fall.

Meanwhile, teachers, students, parents, and the community suffer.
“We have many talented people who have options elsewhere,” Kittle said. “I know in my building at least 12 people who are seeking other work – people I would never want to see leave.”

Posted May 13, 2002