District’s teachers
currently working
without a signed contract
By alison granito
Staff Writer
JERRY WOLKOWITZ Members of the Millstone Township Education Association (MTEA), who are currently working without a contract, turned out in force for Monday’s Board of Education meeting in the library at Millstone Middle School.
Dressed in matching T-shirts which called attention to the fact that they are currently working without a contract, members of the Millstone Township Education Association (MTEA) packed the house at Monday’s school board meeting.
According to a flier that the MTEA handed out at a back-to-school night last week, the union is "not pleased about the conditions under which [the members] are working."
The MTEA represents the township’s teachers, bus drivers and support staff.
"We have returned to school without a new contract. We have been unable to reach a fair contract settlement with the Board of Education, and that is having a negative effect on our abilities to do our jobs as expertly and completely as we would like," read the flier.
JERRY WOLKOWITZ Teachers in attendance at Monday night’s Board of Education meeting in Millstone listen intently as the board’s negotiations committee chair gives an update on the bargaining sessions that have occurred to date.
According to the union, 19 teachers left the school system over the summer due to low pay in Millstone and in search of better health benefits elsewhere.
At the meeting, board member Kathy Winecoff, chairwoman of the negotiations committee, read a chronology of the negotiations process to date into the minutes.
According to Winecoff, the union "flatly rejected" board proposals on health benefits on several occasions so far, but has not yet offered the board any counterproposals.
Winecoff said that the board initially contacted the union to begin negotiations in February, but that the MTEA was not ready to begin negotiations until late March.
She explained that the board informed the union that since this round of negotiations would be complicated by the attempt to merge the contracts of three separate groups — teachers, bus drivers and support staff — into one contract, the late start meant that it would be nearly impossible to complete negotiations by the time the current contract expired at the end of the school year last June.
According to Winecoff’s chronology, the first negotiation session between the school board and the union was held on May 2 and three additional sessions were held throughout the summer. She said that the last negotiating session was held Aug. 22.
"To date the association has not contacted the Board of Education team to schedule a session to continue bargaining," Winecoff said at the meeting.
Irene Pearson, the union’s lead negotiator, said during the meeting that the union "clearly re-iterated its priorities" at every negotiations session so far.
However, she said the board told the union that the union’s priorities were still not clear and that the board was not prepared to schedule another meeting until the teachers made their priorities known.
"We are looking to negotiate at the bargaining table, not in public," Pearson said when asked for comment on the situation.
"We will not at this time get into a public argument over what was supposedly done or not done by both parties at the negotiating table," Pearson said in a drafted statement.
"We are simply trying to move negotiations along by presenting facts in our flier that are already available to the community. We are disappointed that the board feels it is necessary to discuss matters that take place at the negotiations table in this forum," she wrote.