Collective Bargaining is Key to Retention and Recruitment

COLLECTIVE BARGAINING IS KEY TO RETENTION AND RECRUITMENT

Teacher shortage can be addressed at negotiations table

By Kelly Hagen, NDU Communications

Bargaining is never easy. Across North Dakota, negotiations between teachers and school boards are nearly over for the year, with only four contracts still being bargained at the mid-point of August. This year’s negotiations were difficult, with rewards and setbacks for both sides of the table. But, on the whole, all parties in public education involved – including teachers, students, administrators, parents, elected officials and the entire community – benefit overall for going through the process.

“Teachers bargain to improve working conditions, to lure our young scholars into the profession and make the educators more able to focus on educating,” said Karen Christensen, vice president for education for North Dakota United, as well as president of the Wishek Education Association and lead negotiator for their teachers.

Wishek’s negotiations this year was one of several in the state that went to impasse. Under state law, an impasse exists if “after a reasonable period of negotiation, an agreement has not been formulated and a dispute exists,” and “the board of a school district and the representative organization both agree that an impasse exists.” At that point, the North Dakota Education Fact Finding Commission will mediate the dispute, hearing from both sides, and the public, at an impasse hearing. The commission gives its recommendations on a path toward solving the dispute, and then the two sides can either choose to accept the commission’s recommendations or, ultimately, the school board can “impose” a one-year contract on teachers, with the terms that they term acceptable.

The Wishek Education Association went to impasse primarily over one sticking point: contributions made to the Teachers Fund for Retirement (TFFR). WEA wished to change the contribution from a flat rate of $1,205 per teacher, to a rate based on a percentage of the teacher’s salary, so that the contribution grows with the teacher’s years of service.

Christensen said that WEA members wanted this change to assist in efforts to improve retention. “We wanted to have an ace in our pocket, in order to say, ‘Look, here’s what we offer if you stay long-term, what this can mean to your benefit package,’” Christensen said. “We needed something else, because the inconsistency of a flat rate to your staff means you’re offering $1,200 to a beginning teacher, which is 3.5 percent of base, but the longer you stay at school, the less your benefit is.”

Retention and recruitment of teachers are big topics of discussion in North Dakota, currently. Our state, along with many across the U.S., is struggling with a shortage of teachers. The Department of Public Instruction (DPI) recently charged a task force with the responsibility of brainstorming ideas on how to turn the tide, and fill open positions across the state, particularly in smaller, rural districts.

The idea that seemingly should stand out above the rest would be to increase compensation to teachers, in order to increase the pool of applicants to open positions, and also retain the quality teachers already in place. However, in a state that has historically under-compensated all of its public workers, including and especially teachers, that idea doesn’t get as much traction as it should.

So if school districts are unable, or just unwilling, to look at making salary a priority in this fight, they need not look too far off the table to find ways to better retain the experienced educators they already have in place. Look to the bargaining table for your answer.

“The teacher’s voice needs to be brought back into the conversation,” said Tom Young, president of the Grand Forks Education Association and chief negotiator in their latest round of bargaining. “We’ve been ‘done to’ and ‘told to’ and ‘talked to’ for a long time. What we need to have as professionals is to have our professional expertise and our professional vision solicited and respected.”

During negotiations in Grand Forks, the two sides came to an agreement right on the edge of going to impasse. Starting salaries was a big issue, but the real sticking point was preparation time for elementary teachers.

“That was an issue that was at the table for a long time,” said Young. “And what the teachers were really looking for is enough guaranteed time in their work day so that they’re prepared to do their work well. With this highly individualized kind of lessons that teachers are expected to engage with in the 21st Century kind of learning style, that we’re supposed to engage all of our individual students and talk to them. And it’s very time intensive. We just don’t have the time right now in our day to adequately prepare to do what we’re asked to do. And really, when it comes right down to it, it becomes a matter of professional respect to afford the teachers the time they need to do their job well for the kids.”

Key to the issue of recruitment would be an acknowledgment that salaries for beginning teachers must keep pace with the rapid increases in cost of living. This doesn’t always happen, according to Toni Gumeringer, who was a negotiator for Bismarck Education Association this year.

“I know this year,” Gumeringer said, “when we went into negotiations, I had a teacher come in and say, ‘You know, Toni, I just got my daycare bill for next year, and it’s $24,000. And I’m seriously considering not teaching because, at that cost per year for daycare, how far ahead do I come?’”

BEA negotiators drew a hard line in the sand during bargaining to protect some very key parts of their contract, including grievance procedure and access to a sick leave bank.

“You can say ‘no’ (during negotiations), but they came up with saying ‘not interested’ when we were working on some of those things,” Gumeringer said. “So we just kept saying that back to them, toward the end, on those issues we wanted to protect. ‘We want to do this!’ ‘No, we’re not interested.’ … Do we want to give up those sick leave days? Nope. I don’t think we can. Do we want to give up the grievance procedure and make the teachers less protected? Nope. I don’t think we can do that either. And I really think we fought hard to keep the benefits we felt would retain the good teachers in the classroom.”

Standing true to those principles helped teachers in Wishek to earn a contract that contributes three percent of a teacher’s salary toward TFFR. In Grand Forks, a memorandum of understanding was added that puts it into writing that the issue of prep time will be studied, and action will be taken. And in Bismarck, their grievance procedure and sick leave provisions were protected, as agreed to in past negotiations.

As we enter the new school year, and administrators are hitting the panic button over open positions at schools across North Dakota, there should be some acknowledgment that there already is an apparatus in place for addressing the issues in compensation, in working conditions for teachers and learning conditions for students, that are negatively affecting retention and recruitment: the collective bargaining process. Teachers are already at the table, telling officials and administrators what they need in order to take a job in teaching, and to stay in it for years to come. Listen to what they have to say.

“The biggest asset your school is going to have isn’t the furniture and the computers,” Christensen said. “Your biggest asset is going to be the people in the front of the classroom, the people who are directly working with the kids. We have got to have a system that is starting to invest in those teachers that are highly qualified.”