Austintown teachers reject pact
Neither side was sure what will happen next.
By JEANNE STARMACK
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
AUSTINTOWN — The Austintown Education Association voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to reject a tentative agreement that was negotiated with the school district last weekend.
Both sides were saying Tuesday evening they aren’t sure what will happen next.
Sandra DeCerbo, AEA president, said there has been no talk of a strike. She said the membership has not even issued a strike authorization vote for its leaders at this point.
The school board has called an emergency meeting for 5:45 tonight, said its president, Michael Creatore. Creatore said he expects the board will confer with its attorney. The meeting is closed to the public.
Creatore has said he doesn’t expect the board to continue negotiations with the AEA.
Last weekend’s bargaining session came about at the request of the union after its membership rejected what was considered a last and best offer by the board. That rejection came Nov. 14 as 75 percent of the membership shot the offer down.
In last weekend’s bargaining, some changes were negotiated in the offer, Creatore said. He said, for example, that co-pay for health insurance went from 10 percent to 8.5 percent.
This time, he said, 80 percent of the membership rejected it.
“We gave in on deductibles for hospitalization,” Creatore said. “We negotiated fairly.”
DeCerbo said, however, that the disagreement is not financial.
“The focus is on contract language pertaining to selection process for committees dealing with curriculum and schedule structure,” or how class scheduling is done, she said.
She declined to be more specific, though she acknowledged some of the disagreement is over an extra planning period teachers have at Fitch High School. Creatore has said before he doesn’t see the need for two planning periods rather than one.
DeCerbo also had some harsh words for Creatore.
“I firmly believe these two negative votes are a direct reaction from the membership toward all the verbal abuse the outgoing school board president has directed toward the Austintown teachers these past few years,” she said. Creatore did not run again for his seat, and will leave his post in January.
“Hopefully, with his departure, the school board will adopt a more positive attitude toward their professional teaching staff and allow the board’s negotiating team to meaningfully address teachers’ concerns,” she said.
Creatore said the board’s consensus all along has been to work out the issue of the extra planning period.
He said teachers teach for five 50-minute periods a day, and the board believes they should teach for six. He said that with the extra planning period, teachers are teaching for only 4.2 hours a day.
“We pay them for 7.5 hours a day,” he said. “How do you justify 4.2 hours in front of our kids?” He said the extra planning period “is a total waste” of $750,000 a year, and that it was identified as a problem in a state performance audit and in a curriculum audit.
“So it’s not just me saying we have a problem,” he added.
Creatore challenged DeCerbo to justify the extra planning period to the community, but she declined, saying she isn’t sure how to respond.
“I don’t want to debate him in the press,” she said.
As far as his leaving is concerned, Creatore said, he believes the union plans to bide its time until January to get a majority of the board “to give in and continue to poorly negotiate contracts.”
“For decades, the board of education has allowed the teachers union to take every spare dollar out of our school district,” he said. “Taxpayers should soundly reject any requests for tax increases when we have teachers working 4.2 hours and being paid for 7.5.”