Eleven months into contract talks with the town’s teacher union, the Winthrop School Committee is described by the union as seeking intervention by state mediators, after saying it has reached the limit of what the town can afford to pay.

The School Committee has made its “final” offer to the Winthrop Teachers Association, providing salary increases roughly equal to an average overall annual increase of 3 percent, committee chair Layne Petrie said in a written explanation this past week of the committee’s position.

Shortly afterward, the teachers union said that the School Committee had stopped holding contract negotiations and planned to refer the matter to state mediators.

Financial limits

“Unfortunately the School Committee is not willing to meet with us, basically,” said Brian Donnelly, the president of the Winthrop Teachers Association, and a digital media instructor at Winthrop High School.

“The financial constraints that we are under do not allow for us to move any further on cost items,” Ms Petrie said.

The two sides have been working since last May on a new contract that would cover teachers, nurses, secretaries and paraprofessionals in the 250-member Winthrop union.

The previous three-year teachers’ contract, that was approved in September 2022 and expired last August, provided for annual pay increases of 2 percent.

Large stakes

The school system accounts for about $41 million of Winthrop’s $68 million annual budget, and salaries represent more than 60 percent of that amount.

Winthrop voters in April 2025 approved an override from general state tax limits to increase funding for the schools by nearly $5 million, in a bid to fix what town officials described as chronic underfunding of the school system. And the School Committee, in describing the challenges of the contract talks, said that between the 2025 and 2026 fiscal years, health insurance costs for school employees increased $760,000, or about 20 percent, while school expenses increased about 14 percent.

The School Committee’s latest offer would increase pay for teachers and staff by about $3.1 million over the three years, dating back to the start of the current school year. The 3 percent overall increase that the offer reflects is roughly equal to long-term rates of inflation in the area.

The Winthrop Teachers Association has not provided a comparable overall cost of its current contact request, though Mr Donnelly said its figure has “come down significantly” from past levels and is now only about $40,000 apart from the School Committee’s offer.

Mediation costs

Because of that, Mr Donnelly said, the School Committee should maintain the direct negotiations with the union, as the mediation process will cost all sides more money and time.

“We’ve given them a myriad of dates, we’ve given them a list of dates, we have asked them to come back to the table,” Mr Donnelly said of the School Committee. “They have basically refused, and now they are asking to go to mediation. We don’t think we’re at a point that we need mediation yet.”

Most of the remaining issues of contention in the talks, he said, are matters with little to no cost implications, such as rules governing teacher planning time, transfers of secretaries, and half-day schedules.

“We’re worried that, if it gets to mediation, that it’s going to cost more money than we would even be asking for,” Mr Donnelly said.

Contract options

Ms Petrie, in a written summary of the situation, said the School Committee’s proposed pay increase is “a significant investment in total compensation” that reaches the limit of affordability for the town.

“While many proposals put forward during negotiations are well-intentioned, they are not all financially viable,” the committee said in the statement. “Further increases beyond the current proposal would require reductions to staffing, cuts to student programs, and/or the erosion of the district’s long-term financial stability.”

The union has put heavy emphasis during the talks on its assessment that Winthrop’s pay rates for its teachers are especially low compared to those of nearby communities in their treatment of the town’s special education instructors and its most-experienced teachers.

The Winthrop School Committee offer gives the union three options for allocating the pay hike – one that would deliver the 3 percent wage increase to all instructors, and two others that would vary the increases by levels of experience.

Comparison towns

Ms Petrie, in a written summary of the School Committee’s position, described the committee as having a commitment to achieving “alignment with peer districts” on contract benefits. That stands in contrast to the position of the president of Winthrop’s Town Council, Jim Letterie, whose position makes him an automatic member of the School Committee and who suggested late last year that Winthrop’s teachers should not expect salaries comparable to those in surrounding communities because he believes that Winthrop provides them a better and safer community.

In the School Committee’s analysis of its contract offer to the teachers, it drew favorable comparisons in several key areas – salaries, health insurance contributions, sick days, personal days, parental leave, tuition reimbursement and average elementary class size – to the situations in the peer districts that the committee identified as Gloucester, Swampscott, Beverly and Marblehead.

The union also suggested that the two sides could work on a four-year contract, since the first year of the proposed new three-year pact is already nearly complete. “We just didn’t want to come back to the table right away,” Mr Donnelly said. Ms Petrie, however, said the School Committee is not confident in making financial projections running four years.

Mr Donnelly said the union isn’t pressing the four-year idea, but is pleading for a resumption of the negotiations. “We want to make sure that all of the educators in our building are staying there, and are funded, and we’re willing to come down on a lot of it, most of these monetary issues,” he said. “We feel that we need to get back to the table to make these happen.”