Now that the Palm Beach County School District had dried out from Tropical Storm Isaac several issues put on the back burner last week are expected to return to normal, including the ongoing negotiations over teacher raises and working conditions.
The Classroom Teachers Association and school district negotiators will return to the collective bargaining table today at 1:30 p.m. at the union?s headquarters in West Palm Beach. The two sides were set to sit down last Thursday but the district postponed that session after flooding from Isaac?s unprecedented rainfall closed several district schools last week.
At the last session the teacher?s union asked for up to six pay increases over the next year for teachers to make up for experience-based ?step raises? that the union says were promised to teachers long ago but have been frozen by the district for years because of budget woes.
?Somewhere along the teachers were promised that ?this is what you?d make if you came to Palm Beach County Schools. That promise is not being fulfilled,? said Brian Phillips, the chief negotiator for the union.
Chief District Negotiator Van Ludy said he did not expect to give the union a salary proposal in response at today?s bargaining session. But he did plan to make a presentation on the district?s financial situation. Ludy has said in previous sessions that the district simply does not have the money to pay for all the step raises that the teacher?s union wants and has estimated that returning all the frozen raises to teachers could cost more than $70 million.
Phillips has estimated that at most the pay increases would cost a total of about $55 million. An he said he has been pouring through the district?s monthly financial reports for the last year and thinks not only is the district?s financial situation not as bad as it claims but that they have more than enough money to pay for the salary increases teachers deserve.
?They?ve been telling us the sky is falling for years. It hasn?t fallen yet,? Phillips said.
Phillips accused the district of budgeting too conservatively and saving too much money in reserves.
?Do you need to have a reserve at the expense of your employees,? Phillips said.
As evidence he pointed to the monthly financial reports that show each month the district had millions and in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars more in its end of month ?fund balance? reserve than it had predicted it would have by the end of the year. In May of this year, Phillips said, the district had $335 million in reserves though it only predicted it would have about $54 million in fund balance by the end of the fiscal year, which ended June 30.
?That may go down some but it is not going to go down to less than $55 million,? Phillips said as he argued the district could afford to pay for teacher raises out of its savings. ?The money exists right now in reserves. It exists in what they budget for instruction.?
Ludy said he did not know about the specific monthly financial report information Phillips was referring to but said the monthly fund balance typically fluctuates throughout the year as things like property tax payments come in one big chunk some months and then other months the district has big payments it has to make that draws down that fund balance.
?You can?t look at budgets on a monthly basis,? Ludy said. ?They want us to just look at the fat months. It doesn?t work like that.?
In addition to bargaining on teacher salaries the two sides are negotiating on a long list of working condition issues such as how many minutes of planning periods each months teachers have to give up to go to staff meetings and the special conditions where children of teachers are allowed to attend their parent?s school even if it is not their normal neighborhood school.
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Source: http://blogs.palmbeachpost.com/extracredit/2012/09/06/union-negotiations-resume-after-isaac-delay/
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