District 211 reaches tentative contract with teachers union
A tentative contract agreement has been reached between Palatine-Schaumburg High School District 211 and its teachers union, according to a joint statement from the two sides Monday.
Details of the contract are not expected to be released until it's been approved by both sides.
The District 211 board of education is expected to vote on the contract at its meeting Thursday, April 28. The Local 1211 teachers union is expected to ratify the contract through its members' vote before it reaches the board of education.
The tentative agreement comes after the two sides appeared far apart just a short time ago.
Union members voted March 31 to authorize a strike if a contract was not in place to succeed the current one on July 1.
The following week, Local 1211 President Anita Lee said teachers had no wish to strike and the vote was based on what they saw as a significant difference between the sides' positions after six months of negotiations.
"This is not where we wanted to be," Lee said during the first week of April. "I would say pretty early on we knew that we had work to do. It was evident that the board of education and the union were not seeing eye to eye."
Lee said she and her colleagues were open to a breakthrough in negotiations at any time.
"Every session is the opportunity for an amicable ending," she said at the time. "We want to continue to negotiate in good faith. We want to reach an amicable deal. That's the hope. What the strike authorization vote did was open up the lines of communication, oddly enough."
According to the State Board of Education's Illinois Report Card data, the average annual salary of a District 211 teacher in 2021 was $108,794, while statewide the average salary of a teacher was $70,705.
Under terms of the current four-year contract, approved in January 2019 and retroactive to the previous fall, teachers received base salary increases of 2% for the first two years and increases equal to the rate of inflation up to 1.75% in the third year and up to 1.5% in the fourth year.