Winthrop’s top elected official said that the town’s teachers should not expect salaries in line with those in surrounding communities because Winthrop offers them a better and safer community.

Some six months into negotiations between town School Committee representatives and the Winthrop Teachers’ Association on a new three-year contract, and three months after the previous contract expired, the president of the Winthrop Town Council, Jim Letterie, set his own marker on the talks.

“We’re trying – our thing is to be fair,” Mr Letterie said in an interview on WCAT’s Winthrop and the World program. Winthrop, however, has a limited town budget, and teachers who can’t accept that reality might conclude they need to go elsewhere, he said.

“Teachers don’t have to accept anything,” Mr Letterie said on the program. “There are job openings all the time in schools” outside Winthrop, he said.

While that specific perspective may not be shared across the School Committee, teacher salaries – and the town’s willingness to improve them – are understood by some committee members to be the likely climactic issue in the negotiations, especially after an election this month in which Mr Letterie led a conservative slate to a sweep of Town Council elections.

Persistent gaps

The teacher salary gaps in Winthrop relative to other towns are seen as most acute at the lowest and highest ends of the experience spectrum. Specialty aides, known as Education Support Professionals, or ESPs, are paid about $28,000 a year – an amount cited by the union as well below the minimum necessary for meeting basic needs in the area. And while Winthrop teachers have competitive wages in their mid-career years, both sides in the contract talks acknowledge that other nearby towns pay higher salaries to their most experienced teachers.

Winthrop’s teachers also have asked in the talks for improvements in areas that include improved policies on bereavement leave, the ability to use sick leave to help ill family members, expanded time off for religious holidays, and “timely responses to educators regarding student discipline referrals.”

The chief financial obstacles to a contract agreement include inflation, which is currently running around 3 percent in the US. The previous three-year teachers’ contract, approved in September 2022, provided for annual pay increases of 2 percent.

Winthrop also has maintained one of the lower property tax rates in the state of Massachusetts, and it has no major industrial tax base. And Winthrop’s financial flexibility is now hampered by penalties associated with the Town Council’s refusal – a position pushed by Mr Letterie – to comply with the state’s 3A housing law.

Amid those realities, Mr Letterie – a member of the School Committee by virtue of his position as Town Council president, but not one of its contract negotiators – argued that Winthrop offers working conditions superior those found in nearby towns.

Creative solutions

“The bottom line is, you’re working here,” he said, explaining his view of the non-salary benefits for teachers in Winthrop. “You’re working in a great school system – the parents are involved, the parents care, it’s a nice safe community, you’re not walking through a metal detector in the morning. There are a lot of pluses.”

The contract talks involve staff throughout the Winthrop Public Schools system. Units representing the custodians, cafeteria workers and administrators have reached agreements, while representatives of the teachers, ESPs, nurses and secretaries are still negotiating. The Winthrop school system has about 290 full-time staff, including about 158 teachers, according to federal data.

The chair of the Winthrop School Committee, Jen Powell, said she understood the financial pressures that Mr Letterie was describing. Years of inflation, running ahead of the 2.5 percent rise in local taxes allowed under the state’s Proposition 2 1/2 law, have left Winthrop’s schools chronically underfunded, Ms Powell said.

“So we have had to be very creative in how we are able to manage things,” she said. “We have had to pull back on programs, we have had to move things around, to cover the increases in the budget.”

Town voters earlier this year helped the schools by approving a $4.95 million tax hike, beyond the Proposition 2 1/2 law’s limits. Mr Letterie contended that the voters, in approving the override referendum in April, just five months after they overwhelmingly rejected it, conveyed “an understanding that there are certain restrictions that we have on what we can pay” the teachers and staff.

Pay tradeoffs

“I can’t pay somebody what I want to pay them,” he said. “I have to pay somebody what we can afford to pay them.”

Ms Powell, though, offered an assessment of the necessary tradeoffs as less about teachers taking lower pay for a better environment, and more about finding new and better ways – financially or otherwise – of helping the teachers prosper in their jobs and beyond. Comparisons between towns, of what teacher equity looks like in each community, is “a very complicated question,” she said.

“We certainly want to do what we can for our teachers, as we do support them,” Ms Powell said. “At the same time I need to protect the budget, and I represent the full community.”

Representatives of the Winthrop Teachers’ Association declined to comment on Mr Letterie’s rejection of regional pay parity. The association put forth analyses early in the negotiations arguing that their salaries are well behind those in neighboring communities, and called for that to be fixed.

The focus of a broader understanding of teacher well-being, beyond just salaries, seems to be having some success over time, Ms Powell said. The schools superintendent, Lisa Howard, interviews all departing teachers, and has reported that their leading reasons for departing from the district include a desire to change careers or take jobs closer to their homes.

Find your place

“We have not had teachers reporting to us that they are leaving because the pay is too low,” Ms Powell said.

The location question, however, does strike committee members as significant. Fewer teachers live in Winthrop these days, and thereby feel the full benefits of the town, Mr Letterie said. Only about a third of Winthrop’s current teachers and school employees are residents, down from about three-quarters just 10 or 15 years ago, he said.

Ms Powell acknowledged that shift and its importance in a broad sense. “It’s not necessarily that our town is more expensive, but it can be difficult to find housing – it can be difficult to find your place,” she said.

While the prospect of some kind of job action seems unlikely, the ESPs could prove especially difficult to satisfy, Mr Letterie said. They nevertheless are highly valued, he said, because of the work they do with younger children and special-needs students, sometimes in one-on-one or small-group situations.

Teacher strikes are forbidden under Massachusetts law, though they have occurred at times in the state. Winthrop teachers in past contract talks have staged at-school protest activity.