District 300 teachers nix concessions

Community Unit District 300's last attempt to balance the 2010-11 budget has failed.

A package of concessions that could have saved the district millions of dollars failed to muster a majority when the teachers union voted on the package Monday night, the union president said.

The concessions were the district's last chance to achieve the school board's stated goal of cutting $15 million from the 2010-11 budget.

While board members acknowledged even before the union vote that the district would not meet that goal, board President Joe Stevens held out hope as late as two weeks ago that the district could come close.

Now that teachers rejected the concessions by a two-to-one margin, according to the union chief, it is not clear what options the district has left to balance next year's budget. Stevens and Superintendent Ken Arndt could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

In a strongly worded dissent earlier this year, Stevens warned his fellow board members that failing to make administrators share the same burden of budget cuts as teachers could hurt the district in negotiations.

Stevens' fears were borne out this week.

"They didn't feel that administration had taken the same level of cuts that they were expecting the union to do," teachers union President Kolleen Hanetho said. "The teachers are willing to make sacrifices. We just wanted to see everyone make the same level of sacrifice."

The union and the district bargained over the concessions this spring separately from negotiations over the district's teachers contract. The sides agreed earlier this year to extend the teachers contract for a year.

Probably the biggest item teachers voted on this week as part of the package of concessions was "overload pay," money teachers get when their class sizes exceed an agreed-upon ceiling.

District leaders were hoping teachers would agree to waive overload pay for next year, as a large chunk (an estimated $2.5 million) of the savings from laying off more than 100 teachers earlier this year will be eaten up by the extra cost of paying the remaining staff to teach larger classes.

Hanetho said Tuesday that union and district representatives had agreed to a 30-percent reduction in overload pay as well as a 50-percent cut in payments to teachers who supervise kids during lunch. Negotiators had also agreed on more than $1 million in insurance savings for the district.

All of those items were shot down on Monday.

District officials have so far declined to comment on what had been agreed to, but Chief Financial Officer Cheryl Crates said earlier that the district was hoping to save $4.3 million through negotiations.