Winthrop teachers have berated the town’s School Committee for halting contract negotiations, saying that a decision to retreat from talks nearly a year into the process will only delay a final agreement while raising costs and harming student morale.

The talks had long appeared as slow but progressing, with both sides compiling a series of understandings on pay rates and policy matters toward finalizing a new three-year pact. But the union in recent days described the School Committee as avoiding talks for the past month and threatening to seek state intervention in the process.

That prompted dozens of teachers and parents to come before the committee at its Tuesday meeting and demand – without luck – an explanation for the apparent derailment.

Something changed

The union members included Alexis McEvoy, second-grade teacher at the Gorman Fort Banks Elementary School, and a member of the bargaining team for the Winthrop Teachers Association, which accused the committee of mysteriously avoiding the talks since a March 25 session that had seemed to go well.

Describing the negotiations that day on both salaries and non-financial terms such as work schedules and family leave, Ms McEvoy told the committee: “The School Committee said they heard us, that we were close, and that they had ideas on how to address those issues.”

“Since then, however, things have changed,” with canceled meetings, multiple delays on responses, “and an inability to get a straight answer on when we would be back” to meet again, the union representative said. “Then we finally got a straight answer: the School Committee said, ‘You didn’t want to continue bargaining with us.’”

Eight other parents, teachers and residents joined Ms McEvoy in a parade of similar complaints and puzzlement, suggesting that the elected School Committee was harming teachers, students and the town’s reputation, while raising legal and procedural costs, in what now appears to the union as a town attempt to use state power to force its preferred outcome through a mediation process.

State power

“When you take a union to mediation,” said Andrea Aeschlimann, a Winthrop parent and special education teacher in Revere, “eventually they have to take the last best offer – that means you force the union to take whatever you give.”

Winthrop’s schools represent more than $40 million of the town’s $68 million annual budget, and salaries account for more than 60 percent of the school share. The town’s most recent three-year teacher contract expired last summer, and the talks began that May. In them, the School Committee has offered another three-year pact with salary increases of about 3 percent annually, up from 2 percent in the previous agreement. The union, without giving overall numbers, has said that its current and pending offers leave the two sides only about $50,000 apart on costs over the three years.

School Committee members offered no direct response to the union complaints. They used their Tuesday meeting as their annual opportunity to outline their portion of the town’s yearly budget proposal, which had been publicly released the week before. Through that standard budgetary presentation, the town’s schools superintendent, Lisa Howard, repeatedly described financial constraints facing the School Committee without addressing the apparent change in its negotiating stance.

Ms Howard put particular emphasis on the schools facing sharp increases in such areas as health insurance, workers’ compensation, and transportation. The health insurance cost now looks likely to jump 7 percent to 8 percent, after rising 19 percent the year before, she said. The town also is gaining student enrollment, unlike 90 percent of the communities in the state, Ms Howard said. “Why that is, is a mystery to me,” she said.

Revenue limits

In addition, Massachusetts law generally limits annual increases in overall local tax revenue to 2.5 percent, which is below the typical rate of inflation. The town’s voters last April approved a $3.5 million increase in their local taxes beyond that 2.5 percent limit, plus $1.45 million annually for a stabilization fund – both to benefit the schools. Yet Ms Howard said the override only erased past shortfalls so that the schools could open this year with no staff cuts.

The total cost of schools this year is nearly $43 million, with the town covering more than $40 million, and the rest involving grants and other types of income, Ms Howard said. The budgetary situation is worsened for Winthrop by the federal government’s plans to cut about 10 percent from the annual grant money it gives to schools based on their numbers of low-income students, she said. Losses in state grant money for Winthrop due to the Town Council’s refusal to comply with the 3A housing law are not currently seen as a major factor for the schools, she said.

The teachers protesting to the School Committee made repeated references to the question of whether their salaries should be adjusted in the direction of matching those of neighboring communities. Jim Letterie, a School Committee member by virtue of his role as president of Winthrop’s Town Council, suggested earlier in the talks that Winthrop’s teachers could expect to get less money compared to teachers in other towns because of the superior condition of Winthrop and its schools.

About a week ago, however, Mr Letterie led the Town Council in approving an annual increase in retirement benefits for town employees by explaining that the change “brings us up to a base that is comparable to most cities and towns in the commonwealth” of Massachusetts. And at this week’s contentious School Committee meeting, a town resident and former elementary school teacher, Grace Ann Jenkins, said that town officials cited statewide comparisons when they agreed in October 2021 to increase the superintendent’s salary by about 7 percent from $179,000 to $191,000.

Neighbor comparisons

“If competitive pay was the standard used to justify the superintendent’s raise, why is that same standard not being applied” to the teachers and other educators and staff, Ms Jenkins said, without noting that the superintendent’s 2022 raise still left Winthrop’s figure at the low end of similar-sized communities.

Ms Aeschlimann said she is “on the hiring committee at a number of schools in Revere;” sees Winthrop’s teacher pay below levels seen in Chelsea, Revere, Lynn and Boston; and described the region’s schools as being in a moment in which it is “desperately hard to find good teachers and good talent.”

“Winthrop has an incredible reputation for good schools, high parent engagement,” Ms Aeschlimann said. “Winthrop has this, and you don’t want to lose it – you can’t afford to.”

The Winthrop School Committee might have good reasons for the positions it is taking at the moment, said Eric Anderson, a specialized needs teaching assistant at the AT Cummings Elementary School. But union members don’t know that, “because you haven’t spoken a word to us in over one month,” Mr Anderson told the committee. “Sitting down, and talking like humans and neighbors, is the only way we actually can do it,” he said.