Council approves principals’ contract

As published in the Record Journal, Wednesday December 14, 2011

By Russell Blair
Record-Journal staff rblair@record-journal.com
(203) 317-2225

WALLINGFORD — The Town Council approved a new, three-year contract Tuesday for the school district’s administrators that runs from 2012 to 2015 and includes pay raises totaling more than $130,000.

The pay increases over three years, including general wage increases and step increases, amount to 4.79 percent, according to Assistant Superintendent for Personnel Jan Guarino: 0.75 percent in the first year, 2.09 percent in the second and 1.95 percent in the third, for a total of $130,930.

But the raises are coupled with higher insurance co-pay­ments for the bargaining unit, the Educational Administrators Association of Wallingford, which includes the town’s principals, assistant principals and other school administrators. Currently, the copayment is 16 percent, Guarino said. In the first year of the new contract, the amount contributed by the administrators increases to 18 percent, in the second year 19 percent and in the third year 19.5 percent.

School Superintendent Salvatore Menzo said additional insurance-related savings include co-payments for services that used to be cost-free to employees.

“Zero dollars was common across the co-pays,” Menzo said. “We’ve made significant changes; this is something we cannot continue to offer in these economic times.”

Menzo said this year’s contract is less costly to the town than past agreements.

“There is a significant reduction in terms of total cost,” he said.

The three previous contracts for administrators contained increases of $373,000, $266,000 and $234,000, Menzo said. The multi-year raises amounted to 15.05 percent, 10.65 percent and 12 percent.

Menzo said he was pleased with the outcome of the negotiations.

“We do feel that we made growth in the contract,” he said. “There are a lot of areas. This is a challenging contract with many aspects that are unique to Wallingford that we have to work through over time.”

“I want to thank you for your diligence and negotiating hard,” said Democratic Councilor Vincent Testa. “You’re seeking out areas of potential savings that may have been overlooked in the past.”

Councilor John Sullivan, a Democrat who voted in favor of the agreement, said there were still some aspects he didn’t agree with, including longevity payments and an insurance waiver that allows administrators to get cash payments in lieu of taking benefits.

Before the council began talks on the contract, there was a debate about the agenda item, which called for a temporary adjournment of the meeting for the purpose of discussing the agreement.

Town Attorney Janis Small said such talks in the past were held in executive session, but pursuant to Freedom of Information laws the council meeting can be temporarily adjourned and the matters can be discussed in a “non-meeting.”

Sullivan said he has gone into executive session before, not to discuss strategy, but specific questions about the contract that eventually were asked again in public. He said he was in favor of discussing the agreement entirely in public.

An initial motion to recess the meeting and hold a “non-meeting” failed, but after an hour of public questions, a second motion to go behind closed doors, made by Republican Councilor John Le-Tourneau, who said he had strategy questions, passed. Sullivan and Democrat Nicholas Economopoulos, who opposed both motions, remained in the auditorium during the closed-door discussions.

Tuesday’s vote came after the contract was tabled at the council’s last meeting on Nov. 30, when several councilors said they received backup material just a day before the meeting. Tuesday’s meeting was the last for Republican Vice Chairman Jerry Farrell Jr. and for Testa.

FROM WALLINGFORD - In the same fiscal boat

This week’s FROM WALLINGFORD is from my counterpart on the column – Stephen Knight

The Wallingford Town Council held a public hearing on the proposed 2010-2011 Town Budget last Wednesday. As expected, most of the attendees spoke about the Education budget. Most were parents and teachers (very often both) speaking out in favor of maintaining the current level of education spending. As Chairman Parisi acknowledged, they were passionate, articulate, knowledgeable and polite, altogether a real credit to themselves and to the public process.

There was one other attendee: a giant elephant in the room that no one save one lone speaker would even admit existed. That is the proposal that the employees of the Town of Wallingford forego a wage increase for one year in order to prevent layoffs. They spoke about how many talented teachers would be lost, how much the Special Ed students benefited from the system, the potential disruption of reconfiguring the elementary schools, and how hard the BOE had worked to trim the budget already. Everybody talked of the hardships resulting from teacher and staff layoffs, but nobody even came close to recognizing the obvious solution.

It was almost surreal. Speaker after speaker pleaded with councilors not to eliminate these positions, eloquently describing how much value these young teachers brought to the system and how we would lose their energy and talent because of their absence. Yet the simple idea of town employees giving up a wage increase for one year was considered so alien a concept in this world that all the dislocation and hardship described was considered utterly unavoidable.

Why does this perception exist? Let’s examine it from these two vantage points: 1) the public employee world and 2) the union world. And please understand from the get-go that this is not criticism of either but analysis of the reality of both.

First of all, until very recently, government employees have lived in a universe of ever-expanding dollars. Dollars in the private sector are finite, because institutions in this world are confined to only that money they can attract by offering something people want. Government, on the other hand, commands its resources through taxation, the amount limited only to the greater economy’s ability to provide. And that money has always gushed forth from the dynamic American economy. The public employee has never known otherwise — until now — and the new reality of limited resources is not really setting in. 250 people laid off at Marlin Firearms? A one-day story. Layoffs in government? Unheard of. Can’t happen. The money’s there somewhere.

Secondly, unions are in the business of negotiating more for their members. Not less. Not the same. More. Here’s why. Have you ever had to push a car? Remember how hard it was to get it rolling; how much effort it took to get it moving? And how much easier it seemed to keep it moving, and the last thing you wanted was for it to slow to a stop because of how hard it would be to get it going again? Well, unions think that way too. It took them years and years to get to the point where, when they sit down with management to negotiate a new contract, wage increases are assumed. The momentum of negotiating is not whether there will be increases, but how much will these assumed increases be. And we are now asking them to accept a wage freeze — to stop the car, if you will. And their thinking is: if we do this, how will we ever get that momentum back? How will we ever get back to “more” being inevitable?

We are all — taxpayer and public employee alike— navigating in some rough water, and it sure looks like we will be for quite some time. The question then becomes: when will we realize that to survive, we all need to be in the same boat? And paddling in the same direction? And how in the heck do we get there?

FROM WALLINGFORD Teacher layoffs - paradigm shift

This week’s edition of FROM WALLINGFORD was written by my counterpart Stephen Knight

As published in the Record Journal - Sunday March 21, 2010

“We must hang together, gentlemen … else, we shall most assuredly hang sepa­rately.” — Benjamin Franklin

If the Connecticut Education Association (aka: teacher’s union) had that as its credo, the substantial layoffs in the Wallingford school system that are loom­ing might be avoided, But, alas, layoffs are being touted as the only possible way to address the town’s budget shortfall for the coming year. The suggestion to reopen the contract between the CEA and the BOE, and thus avoid these devastating dislocations to so many lives, has been dismissed by union leadership. They will have none of it.

Why is that? Well, there are two reasons that they are unable to bring themselves to doing so: 1) they have never had to, and 2) there is too much else at stake. This is not, mind you, a condemnation of the CEA. Far from it. This is just a picture of the reality that has been constructed over a long period of time, a pathway that they walk that has been built stone by stone over many decades.

First of all, neither the union nor the government has ever faced quite so stark a situation. It has become obvious to most of us that the taxpayer base is plain tapped out. Up until now, for as long as any of us can remember, contract negotia­tions have gone like this: The two sides meet. The town says “We have no money.” The union says “You’ll find it.” They talk. They come to an agreement. The union goes to its members and says “we fought hard and got you this.” The town goes to the taxpayers and says “you’re lucky it wasn’t more.” Everybody stays put. Taxes go up. Everybody moves on. Today negotiations are like this: The two sides meet. The town says “We’re $4 million short. We can’t raise taxes. The state is cutting our funds. We need to talk.” The union responds “You always say that. We have a contract.” The town says “But really. Something has to give.” The union responds “We feel your pain, but we have a contract and we aren’t touching it.” The town says “But people will lose their jobs.” The union responds “If we re­open the contract once, we’ll be doing it forever. No can do.” In other words, they have no idea of how to surmount this ob­stacle, and even their legal advisers are telling them: better to throw forty teach­ers under the bus than to risk setting a precedent you will have to live with in the future. It seems counterintuitive to the stated goals of unionism, but that is the re­ality.

Which brings me to my second point: Unions are no different from any other or­ganization. While the mission statement may say otherwise, the number one goal of the union is survival of the organiza­tion, the same as it is for The March of Dimes, the Red Cross, the US Army or Microsoft. In this case, the union has made a choice that its bargaining position for the future will be irreparably harmed if it concedes to renegotiate its contract with the town. As much as they regret it — and I truly believe that their leadership does regret it — they see these laid off members as casualties that have to be borne for the long term protection of the union’s position.

There will be more dislocation to fol­low. There is a paradigm shift taking place in our economy here in the 21st century, and our comfortable and familiar 20th century methods of coping with these shocks to our system are obviously inade­quate. These forty are a testament to that fact.

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Teachers’ wages

An editorial written by By Richard P. Harkawik P­resident, Wal­lingford E­ducation Association – as published in the Record Journal on Saturday February 20, 2010

A common misconception concerns the salary increase Wallingford teachers received as a result of the last contract nego­tiations. The belief that all teach­ers received a 4.2 percent in­crease in salaries this year is not accurate.

The 4.2 percent represents a percentage of last year’s salary account.This “pool” of money is then used to first pay the cost of increments that are part of the contractual salary schedule; the remainder is then applied to all teachers as an increase. Thus, a 4.2 percent increase does not add 4.2 percent to all salaries. In fact, the majority of teachers re­ceived a 2 percent increase this year, as opposed to the national wage increase average of 2.8 per­cent. Much time was spent dur­ing negotiations in determining how we could “fix” the salary schedule so that it would be more evenly balanced between the different steps, and to make Wallingford more competitive in attracting and retaining quality teachers.

In fact, Wallingford lagged be­hind almost every other town in New Haven County when salary schedules were compared. In or­der to make Wallingford’s salary schedule more equal with the other towns, the 4.2 percent in­crease was necessary. Addition­ally, the teachers also made sev­eral concessions to help this happen: a step freeze this year, and the addition of one step in the schedule. Teachers now have 13 steps; other town unions have between 3 and 5 steps.

The contract itself was ap­proved by the Board of Educa­tion and the Town Council, dur­ing the worst of the economic crisis. Both had the opportunity to reject it; neither chose to do so. It was not long after this con­tract was passed last year that teachers were asked for give­backs. This year, again, we have been asked to make concessions. One has to wonder why agree­ments are made if the intent is not to honor them.

The process of negotiating a contract involves give and take. Wage increases are negotiated in the context of other components, such as insurance co-pays, premium shares, and other ben­efits. Aiming for this balance,the contract was negotiated in good faith, and we now look to the mayor and town council to honor their commitment to the education of our town’s children at the level of excellence they have always received from the teachers of Wallingford.

Technorati Tags: Wallingford,opinion,schools,wages,salary,contract,union