According to this article from the TAB’s Julie Cohen, 80 percent of teachers at Newton South signed a petition asking Mayor Fuller not to attend graduation on June 6 because of “failing contract negotiations.” The teachers’ contract — which was extended last year for one year — expires at the end of August. Fuller told the TAB that she will attend graduation.
In April, Newton Teachers Association president Mike Zilles told the TAB,
““We’re always met with, ‘We just don’t have enough money.’ It’s really demoralizing for the members that I represent. “We just don’t feel like we’re respected.”
As someone who has been following collective bargaining and the teachers’ contract for close to 20 years, I’m confused. I thought the School Committee negotiates with the union, not the mayor. Yes, the mayor decides how much to allocate but the School Committee should be pushing for more money if it’s needed. Did the teachers ask the School Committee chair not to attend graduation also? And, if the mayor is trying to shortchange the school system, why doesn’t the School Committee speak up? Or is this just another publicity stunt from the NTA?
Like Zilles said, it’s not unusual for the NTA to want more money than the city says it can afford. That’s what collective bargaining is all about. I can remember some pretty prolonged contract disputes but I don’t think I’ve ever seen teachers ask the mayor not to attend graduation.
So, what’s different about this year that is inciting teachers to publicly disrespect the mayor?
Maybe continuing to pay NPS at significantly lower rates than our peer cities is “inciting” them. I’ve heard directly from a couple of NSHS teachers who haven’t been historically very involved in NTA activity that the Fuller administration and school committee has come across as extremely demeaning this contract cycle, which has sparked a lot of anger (as seen by a lot of the NSHS teachers venting on Facebook about Fuller for the past few months)
The teachers union should be ashamed of themselves for coercing some of the best teachers in the nation to turn a graduation into a negotiating tactic.
The mayor is the mayor, and should be welcomed with open arms for such an important event. Period.
A graduation should be focused 100% on the successes of the students with the guidance of our educators.
A graduation is never the place for labor negotiations. Ever.
@charlie I think it’s very demeaning to NPS teachers, who have previously worked without a contract out of respect for their profession and our students, to deduce them to mere bargaining puppets.
@Jim,
I believe the teachers feel demeaned but how does singling out Mayor Fuller like this further their cause? Union leadership must know that there’s no way she’d miss graduation. And, again, I ask: Why isn’t their anger directed at the School Committee as well?
The teachers union received a 6% increase last time. Their wages jumped significantly. They also receive defined benefits in both
healthcare and pensions. Most private companies have given up on defined benefits because that system is too costly.
Most teachers have a classroom aide to help with student work load.
Statewide Newton is considered a good place to work and their pay scale is generous in comparison to many other cities and towns.
Mayor Fuller is wise to bargain hard this year. Something has got to give. Newton schools are raising their yearly costs exponentially . Residents can not afford another $80 million budget increase. In previous years the budget increase averaged
below $30 million each year.
At this rate annual taxes will rise so much many families will have to move away.
Newton’s elected “leaders” have historically done a miserable job negotiating teacher contracts. It’s always an acrimonious process. We really should try changing the way the city approaches collective bargaining with the NTA.
Personally, I believe Newton should pursue only the best teachers, and we should do that by offering the best pay. Teacher compensation should be determined through benchmarking, with Newton always at the very top of the pay scale. But the union would have to make some concessions, like agreeing to a change in high school start times, and making it easier to terminate underperforming teachers.
I really don’t blame them. They’re unhappy and seeing Mayor Fuller pose for an endless stream of photo ops at graduation probably doesn’t feel very good.
@Colleen that’s simply not true.
Newton teachers make on average $81,213. Peer districts, and even districts with significantly worse student performance outpace that. Brookline averages $101,413, Weston $99,887, Wayland $96,103, Westwood $92,716, Needham $91,350, and Cambridge $88,737.
There’s nothing stopping our excellent teachers from commuting an extra ten minutes and making 10k more in Needham. We can’t rank 85th in teacher pay (that’s not hyperbolic), and expect to have a top tier district.
All data from: http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/statereport/teachersalaries.aspx
This is very misguided. Graduation should not be politicized. This should be a day for students, families and faculty to celebrate their accomplishments. There are more productive ways for a union to articulate its unhappiness. On the other hand, I can’t think of too many things the union could do to make itself look worse.
I agree with much of what Mike Striar said, and I agree that our teachers are underpaid.
That being said, this is sad. It is NOT the teachers’ graduation. It is the students’ graduation. If I were a student, I would want the Mayor in attendance. If the NTA thinks this is a way to create goodwill with the community, they are wrong.
Something similar happened at BC about 10 years ago. Condalisa Rice spoke at graduation. Some faculty protested. If students want to ruin their graduation that is their business, but it is sad when it is the adults who ruin things.
The mayor is going to the graduation. The teachers and staff will celebrate with their students. It will be a joyous event as it always is.
The only difference between now and before the NS petition signed by over 80% of the staff is that the community knows that a very significant percentage of Newton educators are extremely unhappy with the lack of progress with the contract negotiations.
This means that NPS educators will enter the 2019 school year without a contract and the community and parents need to know and understand the implications of that. A good compensation package is essential to attracting and retaining top candidates for every position in the school system. The hiring landscape in public education is much more competitive than it used to be and, as noted above, Newton simply isn’t keeping up with nearby communities.
Beginning September 1st, NPS employees will be working without a new contract, and that’s the reality of the situation.
So this was basically a publicity stunt?
@Jim- I agree. That’s why the union should not have done it.
I support teachers in nearly everything, however asking the mayor NOT to show up to graduation makes the day political. Graduation is about celebrating the students for graduating high school. The families and the students have attending school for 13 years. The mayor and the school committee should be there supporting the kids and what a milestone it is.
Please don’t make the day a battle. Make it a celebration. Appear as a united front.
No.
An attempt to embarrass her?
No
I think this stunt is simply a test of the mayor’s strength, by the union, as well as a sign of the political times we live in. Appears very disrespectful to the city.
I don’t think it’s right to ask the Mayor not to attend the Graduation.
There is a right way to make a statement and this is not it.
But with that being said, when the City says they don’t have the money, people (and the Unions) need to look at the recent hiring of a part time, 16 hour a week employee for a salary of $75,000 annually…plus a car.
Here’s a statement Mayor Fuller issued in response….
Actions speak louder than words. If the NTA is frustrated, perhaps they should be the ones to boycott graduation. Or they could do what ordinary people (including me) do when we’re unhappy with our jobs: go work somewhere else. I do not mean that in a flippant or disrespectful way. Just a few key teachers leaving should really get the mayor’s and School Committee’s attention. And those teachers would get the extra pay that they deserve.
For all the talk about salary disparities compared to other communities, economists would hypothesize that other factors are at play. The marketplace for teaching positions and teachers is large and, in my experience, fairly efficient. Why have NPS teachers been willing to accept lower pay all this time? Evil City? I don’t buy it. Could it be that NPS offers something else of value to teachers that other districts don’t? Nicer students, curriculum, location, facilities, benefits? I don’t know. But I do know that teachers, like most humans, don’t deliberately stay in places where they feel undervalued when they have a better alternative. I saw the an informative example at Harvard Medical School. Salaries and the pace of career advancement for junior faculty were low compared to some less famous institutions. Harvard could usually get away with it because many people ascribed value to the Harvard name. It was perfectly fair to let faculty decide what they valued more: extra money and a quicker promotion, or the Harvard name on their CVs.
A question for V14: how many posts have there been on the teacher’s contract negotiations on V14? Zilles got what he needed, which was awareness.
Fully agree with Striar and Jim. We should be paying at the top, for the best, with some concessions from teachers on teaching times and other structural elements, to ensure our system is the best. That clearly has not been the priority for Newton in many years.
@Michael
Newton isn’t Harvard.
Economics would actually say, the market is efficient and you get what you paid for. Rather than wildly speculate that we’re getting the best teachers with lower salaries because of some unknown intangibles, the more likely explanation is that we don’t get the best teachers, who instead go to higher paying districts.
@Paul: You write that “we don’t get the best teachers”. In other words, you think our teachers are substandard?
That is simply not true. We have excellent teachers in Newton Public Schools. The proof is in our students’ achievements, their test scores, and the vast number of families who choose Newton to enroll their kids in our schools.
As the negotiations are happening behind closed doors, most of us have no idea what the sticking points are – health care benefits, class size, salary…. I appreciate the Mayor being a strong negotiator because unless we have an override we have a fixed pot of money to divide between the Schools and City. There are many needs she has to balance. If we want to spend more on the schools, I’d rather we had an override first, as opposed to cuts elsewhere.
@NewtonMom: I couldn’t agree more. My youngest child is graduating Newton South on Thursday, and I wish I could just celebrate the day. The political situation will now be on my mind as I watch the proceedings. [My oldest child graduated in 2014, when the Superintendent plagiarized some of his comments. Is there any event without controversy?]
I haven’t seen any response to Gail’s questions about whether the SC Chair was asked not to attend or why the Mayor was singled out. Any NTA members who can shed some light here?
I believe thr School Committee Chair, Ruth Goldman has a child graduating from South this year so that certainly would have been a sticky ask by the Teachers.
Mayor Fuller was quite deliberate (in her statement) to point out that Ruth Goldman leads the negotiating committee.
Standard operating procedure would have Ruth speaking at South graduation, especially if she has a child graduating.
I ask again: why does the school committee get a free pass?
To quote the sign on President Truman’s desk in his White House office: “The Buck Stops Here”. While the school committee negotiates with the union, Newton mayors have always played a significant role in completing the negotiating process. After a full year of negotiations, Mayor Fuller needs to roll up her sleeves and be part of the process, just as Mayor Mann, Cohen, and Warren did.
The increased difficulty in attracting and retaining top candidates in Newton has been a concern for a number of years. In 2005, Newton ranked 9th in the state in compensation and we now don’t make the top 40. The fact that we’re surrounded by communities with better salary scales and similar student demographics makes it all the harder. The claim that Newton’s average salary has dropped because our staff is young is not a factor. The same holds true for every neighboring community.
Michael – Parents in the community have been clear that the “go work somewhere else” mantra is not something they want to see happen in Newton. Newton has a school system comparable in quality to many others. We aren’t living on an island in the midst of towns with horrible school districts and, in fact, test scores in many of these communities are better than Newton’s.
This is one of the main issues Newton faces in attracting and retaining top candidates and teachers : if you’re young and want to buy a house, pay off massive student loans, or have one child in daycare for $25,000 a year or two for over $37,000 a year, then you will take the job that pays the most. That’s the reality we’re faced with. Either we deal with it, or we deal with the consequences.
@ Michael
Our test scores are lower than many other towns in MA. Given our general SES status, and test correlation with wealth, we should be doing better.
The gap between Lexington and Newton is significant, for example.
In 2007(oldest I could find online), the School budget was $143M, and it’s now $236M. That’s a $112M increase over 12 years, or an average annual increase of 8.58%. The City budget in 2007 was $152M, which includes water, sewer, community preservation funds, etc, and it’s now $194M. That’s a $42M increase over 12 years, or an average annual increase of 3.5%. While I understand that the Mayor has a role to play in the contract negotiations, it seems that with the historical allocation of funds, the School Committee and School Department should be able to get most of the way there on their own. Why this would automatically fall directly to the Mayor is beyond me.
Randy, I believe there is a policy that every dollar over the base budget from 2006 (maybe, not sure of the year) was to be divided 70% to the schools and 30% to the city. I think that’s why you are seeing such a disparity. I seem to remember this was implemented during Mayor Cohen’s tenure.
I stand with the people thinking that it’s a shame to try to politicize a graduation. There are other options. I think it’s against “the law” (??) for the teachers to picket in front of the school, but what if they were to picket in front of city hall on the weekend or at night…as long as they don’t interrupt traffic. I don’t know if that’s OK or not, but my greater point is there had to be a better way to make their voices heard and educate the public.
Randy, we had an override in 2013 (?)that had a big impact on growth of the budget. Also, enrollment has increased by about 2,000 students
Gail, school enrollment went up 1,150, or 9.9% since 2007, and the budget went up 60.6% over that same period, and the override had relatively small impact on the school budget itself compared to the total growth over that period. I’m not suggesting that we are spending too much on the schools at all. I’m suggesting that with the amount of financial gains they have seen, coupled with the steadying of the enrollment growth curve, the onus should be on the SC and NPS to shoulder most of the contractual negotiation process. If there is no way to negotiate a fair contract within the confines of the school budget, then it should be proved out, and then the Mayor can step in to assist. It just seems to me that we skipped to the end on this one. I will acknowledge that there’s a possibility that this process has already played out, but we can only go on what we know.
Tom-No one will be picketing at the school.
Mayors have always been involved in negotiations when the two sides hit a stalemate, as we have now.
Newton educators have spent the last 10 months negotiating with the school committee. For whatever reason, the community hasn’t noticed union actions related to the stalled negotiations over the past three to four months.
Beginning September 1st, Newton educators will be working without a newly negotiated contract. What you will see at that point are not “stunts”. None of the union actions so far have been “stunts” either.
Randi-The system has also added new programs. The programs enhance the school system but come with a significant cost.
One of the police unions has been without a contract for five or so years, and not a whisper about it. Maybe they should take a note from the NTA’s book!
One of my earliest concerns about Fuller was that she wouldn’t fully support our unions or our public schools and unfortunately I’m feeling that I might be right.
I’m someone who is sympathetic to teachers in general, the teachers union, and the fact that Newton teachers salaries have been slowly falling behind other towns.
That said, my sympathy for the NTA just flew out the window with this misguided stunt to hijack the students” big day.
Absolutely appalling in every way. Shame on you.
These are the actions that Newton educators have taken in the last four months in an effort to communicate with the school committee, administration, the mayor, and the community about the contract stalemate:
1. Wear Red for Ed t-shirts every Tuesday
2. Do standouts at every schools with signs and leaflets explaining what the issues are
3. Placed signs on close to 400 lawns
4. On April 1st, 400 educators held a rally and marched to a school committee meeting from NNHS to the Ed. Center.
5. Newton educators spoke at the School Committee meeting during the public comment segment after the march.
6. Another action will wrap up this week. It will have no impact on students or families.
Either very few people heard or were listening, though we’ve been heartened by the support from parents and community allies. As yet it hasn’t resulted in any movement toward a settled contract. Maybe it’s because another issue has dominated the citywide conversation for the last three years – I really don’t know. Recently I read a survey about residents’ concerns and the schools were fifth or sixth on the list. That’s alarming under any circumstances and should be alarming to every parent with a child in the school system. When your educators are in the midst of a contract dispute and the state of the school system is that low on the list of concerns, something is amiss.
Jerry – The only people who belong to the Newton Teachers Association are Newton teachers and staff. No one else.
So, @Paul looked at research that showed our test scores are lower than many towns in MA. @Jane Frants said our salaries are lower so we can not attract and retain the best teachers. These two points lead me to believe we don’t have the best teachers, and this is hurting our kids. So, I agree that we need to have our pay commensurate with surrounding communities so we can begin improving our students’ test scores and attracting the cream of the crop for teachers. My question is, how do we replace the current teachers with the high quality teachers? Will current teachers lose their jobs? Like @Jane Frantz said, the best teachers are going to the places with the better pay, so this leads me to believe we don’t have the best teachers, which is something I think most of us want for the kids in Newton schools. If we raise the salaries, it’s not going to solve our problem if our current teachers who aren’t the best get these raises. I am not clear on how we fix this problem. I do not have kids in the public schools (I don’t have kids) so I am someone who wants the best education for the kids in Newton simply because I believe it’s important. I am OK with paying higher taxes for education.