By Philip Sean Curran Staff Writer
A marathon negotiation session that ended in the wee hours of Wednesday brought the Princeton school board and the teachers union “a lot closer” to reaching a new contract, said the head of the school board.
The two sides began meeting at 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday to hammer out their differences over wage and benefits that has created a stalemate that has dragged on through last summer and into the school year.
School Board President Andrea Spalla said Wednesday that the board and the Princeton Regional Education Association had made “steady progress” on those two issues through Tuesday. They kept talks going into the night before finally breaking off around 2:15 a.m. Wednesday.
“We’re a lot closer than we were,” Ms. Spalla said without elaborating.
Union president Joanne Ryan could not be reached for comment. But John Baxter, a high school teacher leading the talks for the union, released a brief statement.
“We did not reach a tentative agreement but scheduled a meeting for next Wednesday … to continue talks,” he said.
Ms. Spalla said the board wants to get a deal done before schools go on summer break.
The old contract between the school board and the teachers expired at the end of June 2014. The roughly 375 union members have been working under the terms of the old deal until a new one is reached.
A critical issue for the union is to lower the amount its members pay toward their health benefits. A teacher earning the average salary of roughly $79,000 is paying 23 percent of his or her premium for family coverage.
The marathon negotiation session was “mentally exhausting,” Ms. Spalla said in likening it to driving cross country. She even had to make a pizza run to get food for herself and fellow school officials.
Ms. Ryan and other representatives of the union work as teachers in the district. Since there was school Tuesday, the district paid to have substitute teachers fill in for them, Ms. Spalla said.
