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ROTTERDAM
Schalmont teachers hit picket line over stalled contract
Deadlock is over benefits, salary issues
BY JUSTIN MASON Gazette Reporter
Reach Gazette reporter Justin Mason at 395-3113 or jmason@dailygazette.net

   Schalmont teachers picketed outside the high school campus Tuesday, claiming the administration has deadlocked contract talks by failing to compromise.
   Carrying signs with slogans of “let’s talk we’ll settle” and “it’s negotiate not no-gotiate,” more than 100 members of the Schalmont Teachers Association picketed along Duanesburg Road. The teachers have worked without a contract since June 2006, when their threeyear agreement with the district expired. The union has about 200 members.
   District officials decided to seek fact-finding in August, after several rounds of negotiations and mediation with the Public Employment Relations Board failed to yield an agreement. The independent analysis is anticipated this fall and will involve a non-binding recommendation for a settlement.
   Union President Alisha Bahrmann, a reading teacher at Jefferson Elementary School, characterized the district’s attempts to settle the negotiations as one-sided and failing to make necessary concessions to the teachers. She said the district unilaterally filed for both mediation and fact-finding without making any effort to negotiate a compromise.
   “They don’t understand what negotiations are,” she said from the picket line. “For them, it’s either you meet all our demands or you get nothing.”
   The union and district have agreed on the non-monetary items, but are at a deadlock in the area of benefits and salary. The district is proposing to switch the teachers’ health insurance from the selffunded “Schalmont plan” to a different system that would require a 15 percent teacher contribution by 2010.
   Superintendent Valerie Kelsey said the Schalmont plan costs the district $28,000 annually per teacher for family coverage. She said switching to the new plan — one that is now used by both the administration and support staff — would save the district more than $300,000 per year.
   “We’ve tried to be very fair and reasonable in our negotiations,” she said. “We have good educators in Schalmont, and I don’t want to lessen the importance of their contributions, but we also have a commitment to be fair and reasonable with our taxpayers.”
   Bahrmann said her union would be more than willing to negotiate a more affordable health plan, as long as the district is willing to make salary concessions. She said both the administration and support staff were offered greater pay increases in exchange for signing on to the benefit changes proposed by the district.
   “We’re just looking to hold onto what we have, with a salary and insurance that is comparable to what our colleagues are getting in the Capital District.”
   Bahrmann also pointed to Schalmont’s recent designation by the state Education Department a high-performance gap-closing district. She offered the designation is evidence the district’s teacher are performing at or above the level of their peers.
   “We’re doing our part as professionals to bring success to Schalmont,” she said.
   The teachers last protested to the district in June, when more than 150 members turned out to a Board of Education meeting wearing union shirts. Bahrmann said the last contract with the district in 2003 wasn’t nearly as difficult to reach because the administration at the time was more willing to compromise.
   But Kelsey said the district is keeping an open mind with negotiations and is willing to work out a deal long before the matter goes to fact-finding.
   “At any time, the parties can come back and negotiate,” she said. “The district is more than receptive at any time to sit down and negotiate.”

ANA N. ZANGRONIZ/GAZETTE PHOTOGRAPHER
Members of the Schalmont Teachers Association picket outside the school complex on Route 7 in Rotterdam Tuesday. The teachers have been without a contract for more than a year.

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“it’s negotiate not no-gotiate,”

Quoted from johnny

It's NOGOTIATE  because 1 side is NOT negotiating......... allegedly

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Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Reward for a good job? Not quite

   On the education front, we have settlement of a teachers’ contract in Scotia-Glenville, we have stalemate on a teachers’ contract at Schalmont, and we have — what’s this? — merit pay for teachers in New York City?
   Could it be? Why, getting rewarded for a doing a good job and penalized for doing a bad job has always been anathema to teachers’ unions, which insist on all their members getting paid strictly according to how long they have been on the job, or in labor terms, according to seniority. You make so much your first year, so much your second year and so on throughout your career regardless of whether you are a dedicated professional who spends lots of extra time with your students and gets good results or a piece of deadwood suitable for a landfill.
   No “merit pay” ever, is their position — no reward for good work, no penalty for bad work, which I would love to hear them explain to their students in civic class, though that’s another issue.
   But there was the headline the other day on the front page of The New York Times: “Teachers Agree to Bonus Pay Tied to Scores,” which the Times characterized as a “major breakthough.”
   And in a way I guess it was, though you had to read the story carefully to see how carefully shaded, hedged, and qualified this particular breakthrough was.
   You had to read pretty far down to discover that individual teachers are not going to be rewarded for improving the test scores of their own particular students. Rather, schools as a whole will get an extra pot of money, averaging $3,000 per teacher, if test scores for the whole school go up, and a four-member committee, including two representatives of the teachers’ union, will decide how to distribute the money.
   “This shuts the door on the individual merit pay plans that I abhor,” the union president was quoted as saying, just so no one gets any subversive ideas.
   Of course there was not a mention of penalizing teachers whose students do badly. That is beyond discussion.
   You also had to read a little bit to discover that this alleged breakthrough did not come free to the city of New York. They had to pay for it, as you have to pay for everything you want from a public-employees union. The price? Allowing the city’s teachers to retire with full benefi ts at age 55 if they have worked just 25 years rather than the previously required 30 years.
   That is the price for getting them to accept extra pay averaging $3,000 each! Why do you have to coax them into such a thing? Because the extra pay is tied, even if indirectly, to how well they do their jobs, that’s why. It violates a basic principle of theirs, or it comes close.
   Even with all that, it’s still not mandatory. Union chapters in each school will be able to vote on whether or not to join the program, so touchy is it.
   Which brings me back to Schalmont and Scotia-Glenville, where merit pay, as it’s called, is not an issue.
   Scotia-Glenville teachers just won a new contract that gives them the usual automatic pay raises year by year regardless of performance, pay raises averaging 4.4 percent a year over the next three years.
   This will make the pay of a 23-year teacher $83,144 next year, plus whatever bonuses he or she might receive for assisting with extracurricular activities.
   Schalmont, meanwhile, remains stalled in negotiations for a new contract, though that does not mean that salaries are stalled, much less that they are going down, despite the picket sign carried by a teacher recently and pictured in this newspaper: “TEST SCORES UP, SALARIES DOWN.”
   Nor does it mean the teachers are working without a contract, as often stated in news reports. Thanks to a state law known as the Triborough Amendment, their contract remains in effect even after its nominal term comes to an end, and their salaries continue to go up, step by step, until they reach the top step, which is after 25 years in Schalmont’s case.
   I got hold of the Schalmont salary schedule just to satisfy myself on this point, and I also talked to the district superintendent, Valerie Kelsey, and it was as I had expected. Teachers at every level are getting their automatic raises right up to the top step of $86,234, and those raises average, by my calculation, 3.25 percent a year.
   To make doubly sure, I asked the superintendent how many teachers had seen their salaries go down during the two-year contract stalemate, and she seemed puzzled by my question. “I can’t imagine how that could happen,” she said, and of course neither could I, which was why I asked. “Zero,” she said.
   So, question: How much chutzpah does it take to go out on a picket line with a sign saying “… SALARIES DOWN,” when you’re getting automatic 3.25 percent annual raises, and your pay is topping out at $86,234 (for a 180-day work year)? And you refuse to tie your pay to how good a job you do.

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Maybe it's time to do what happened to the air controllers when they got greedy.

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Teachers confront school board
More than 100 show unity over stalled negotiations
BY JUSTIN MASON Gazette Reporter

ROTTERDAM — Sporting black union T-shirts and ‘no contract’ pins, more than 100 Schalmont teachers crowded into the Board of Education meeting Monday in a show of solidarity over stalled negotiations.
    Interim union President Mary Beth Flatley quietly led the crowd of teachers into the Woestina Elementary School’s gymnasium just minutes before the board’s regular meeting convened. The 200-member union has worked without a contract since June 2006, when their three-year agreement with the district expired.
    Flatley said the lasting stalemate between the administration and the union has created a deteriorating situation within the district. She said the concessions being sought by district far outweigh the contract demands of the union.
    “They’re looking for many givebacks and the only thing we’re looking for is a comparable salary increase,” she said.
    District officials sought fact-fi nding in August, after several rounds of negotiations and mediation with the Public Employment Relations Board failed to yield an agreement.
    Board President Michael Della Villa said fact-finding was completed late last month and a nonbinding recommendation for a settlement is due back within the coming weeks.
    “We’re hoping for a favorable proposal so we can put this all behind us and get down to the task at hand, which is to ensure our children get the best possible education,” he said following the meeting.
    The union and district have agreed on the non-monetary items, but are at a deadlock on benefi ts and salary. Administrators have insisted on switching the teachers’ health insurance to a different system that would require a 15 percent contribution by 2010.
    Union leadership has criticized district administrators for being unwilling to make concessions. Several teachers echoed this criticism Monday.
    Karen Ryder, a social studies teacher at Schalmont High School, scolded board members for not taking a more active role in negotiations. She also criticized them for not being more visible.
    “Don’t you think as elected board members you should have a working knowledge of the facilities you oversee?” she asked.
    The meeting was also attended by Schalmont parents that offered some support to the district’s position. Kimberly Ricker-VanLuyk, the parent a Woestina fifth grader, said the district’s teachers seem to be paid a favorable wage in comparison to other regional schools and urged the board not to be “bullied by anyone.”


MEREDITH L. KAISER/GAZETTE PHOTOGRAPHER Mary Beth Flatley, a sixth-grade English teacher and interim president of the Schalmont Teachers Association, speaks to the Schalmont Board of Education Monday at Woestina Elementary School in Rotterdam Junction.

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Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.

Surprise!
Taxes rise
with STAR

    Don’t blame me, ladies and gentlemen. I told you way back in 1997, when the Hon. George Elmer Pataki was touting his new STAR program — standing for School Tax Assessment Relief — that it was a shuck.
    I explained that the state was going to give local school districts money to offset a reduction in property assessments with the idea that local school boards would exercise restraint, and I asked rhetorically, Is there anyone in his right mind who believes that school boards will do anything but take the money and run?”
    I remember suggesting to a fl ack in the governor’s press offi ce at the time that school boards would feel free to spend more since they would have more, and I remember the flack saying, “Oh, I can’t imagine they would do that.”
    Well, now we have the news from the Public Policy Institute, an arm of the state Business Council, that — guess what — since the adoption of STAR, property taxes have been going up faster than ever.
    “Property taxes increased 3 percent a year from 1995 to 2000, then
    percent a year from 2000 to 2005, more than double the rate of infl ation,” the institute found.
    More specifically, school tax levies “rose four times as fast been 2002 and 2007 as they did in the previous five years.
    So I believe my nickel is safe. The governor and the Legislature trumpeted when the STAR program started that school taxes would go down 27 percent, based on the fanciful assumption that school boards would absorb the new subsidy responsibly, and I offered at the time to pay a nickel to anyone who could find a school district anywhere in the state where that actually happened.
    I even remember Gov. Pataki visiting the Annie Schaffer Senior Center in Schenectady early in 1998, when STAR had just kicked in, and shamelessly telling the innocents there, “Your school taxes will go down $890.” Yes, $890!
    He had to know better. He himself had proposed limiting how much school boards could raise taxes after they got the new subsidy, and the Legislature, in response to lobbying by the School Boards Association and the teachers’ unions, rejected it.
    So here we are now in the great state of New York, paying $2,303 in property taxes a year for each man, woman and child, which is the highest in the nation and double the national average, and those taxes are going up faster than ever “under cover of STAR,” as the Public Policy Institute aptly put it.
    The remedy? The institute modestly proposes, among other things, the elimination of the Wicks Law, which requires separate contracts on big construction projects, to the benefit of the construction industry; reform of the Triborough Amendment, which keeps publicemployee labor contracts in effect for eternity; an “update” of public employees’ immensely expensive pension plans, and so on. In all of which I wish the Public Policy Institute, and the rest of us, the best of luck.
SCHALMONT CONTRACT
    Perhaps you noticed the photo in this newspaper the other day of a teachers’ union president wearing button saying “NO CONTRACT” as she addressed the Schalmont Board of Education.
    And perhaps you read the accompanying article that said, “The 200-member union has worked without
    contract since June 2006, when their three-year agreement with the district expired.”
    If so, I will repeat what I have already explained approximately 247,519 times in the past: Teachers never work without a contract, nor do other unionized public employees, thanks to the above-mentioned by the state Legislature in 1982 as a refinement of the Taylor Law.
    When their contract reaches the end of its term, it nevertheless remains in full force and effect until a new one is agreed to.
    This is different from a contract between you and me. If we draw up a contract and specify an expiration date, when that date comes, the contract is finished and we have to start over again.
    What’s more, teachers have a salary schedule that specifies annual “step increases” — or raises, in plain English — and that salary schedule is part of the contract and thus also remains in effect, meaning that teachers continue to get their raises every year even as they wear buttons or carry picket signs proclaiming “NO CONTRACT.”
    In the case of Schalmont those raises average 3.25 percent a year and culminate in a top salary of $86,234 for a teacher with 25 years’ experience.
    So when you hear them complain about lack of a contract or lack of raises, keep that in mind. What they’re demanding is an increase above the automatic 3.25 percent that they’re already getting.
    I will not spell out again the number of days a year they work, nor how much extra they get paid for supervising extracurricular activities, nor the age at which they can retire at half pay, since I begin to sound like a broken record even to myself.
    But I will note that one of the health-insurance plans that teachers have access to in Schalmont, and which the administration is trying to change, costs $28,000 a year for family coverage. Can you imagine that?
    As for the effect of all this on property taxes, I refer you back to the first half of this column

Quoted from Shadow

I just have one question , how much money is enough?

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I'd say that $86,234 is a very high salary for a teacher with 25 years service plus benefits

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I explained that the state was going to give local school districts money to offset a reduction in property assessments with the idea that local school boards would exercise restraint, and I asked rhetorically, Is there anyone in his right mind who believes that school boards will do anything but take the money and run?”
    I remember suggesting to a fl ack in the governor’s press offi ce at the time that school boards would feel free to spend more since they would have more, and I remember the flack saying, “Oh, I can’t imagine they would do that.”
    Well, now we have the news from the Public Policy Institute, an arm of the state Business Council, that — guess what — since the adoption of STAR, property taxes have been going up faster than ever.

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Teachers should contribute more to their health care

    Re Feb. 12 article, “Teachers confront school board — More than 100 show unity over stalled negotiations”: I continue to find it interesting that the Schalmont Teachers Association and their union feel entitled to health insurance benefits at minimal cost to them while most private-sector employees continue to see their out-of-pocket costs increase. In addition to not being able to afford their own, they are expected to pay more (via school taxes) so that teachers continue to enjoy these benefi ts at reduced expense.
    A recent report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a recognized leader in health care policy, showed the average premium for family coverage in 2007 is $12,106 and workers on average now pay $3,281 out-of-their paychecks to cover their share of the cost of a family policy. The average worker is paying 27 percent of their employer-provided premium; the Schalmont administration is only asking for 15 percent — and that doesn’t occur for two more years. This is not an unreasonable request by any means.
    Several months ago, I came home to a message on my answering machine from a parent asking for support in the teachers’ battle with the school board. The message proceeded to say that the union is requesting the teachers “do less” with the children. The “do less” example referred to less projects and display of these projects in the hallways. I found this very interesting, particularly when I witness the sea of shirts asking us to invest in education, yet they are doing less.
    Dedicated, responsible teachers, who continually prove their value, should be paid a fair, comparable wage as well as comparable benefits. I have been very pleased with the teachers and instruction my children have received thus far.
    However, it needs to be made very clear to the politicians, union leaders and state administrators that the taxpayers of New York are fed up. They are fed up with continually being asked to pay more for their own benefits in addition to those of public employees. I do not feel that it is unreasonable to make all public employees contribute a comparable percentage of their salary toward their benefits as any other employer requests, and I applaud Board President Michael Della Villa and the current administration for standing their ground against this rhetoric, all in the name of “your children’s education.”
    MICHAEL PASQUARELLA
    Rotterdam

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Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE $28,000 for insurance? You betcha
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@nycap.rr.com.

    I mentioned the other day that one of the health insurance plans that teachers have access to in the Schalmont school district of Rotterdam costs $28,000 a year for family coverage, and more than one reader inquired, “Wha? Twenty-eight thousand U.S. dollars? For health insurance?”
    That’s right, dear readers. It’s called the Schalmont Plan, and it’s a “self-insurance” plan provided by the district, descended from a state plan that many school districts participated in back in the 1960s and early 1970s, before health insurance costs went astronomical.
    Other districts negotiated their way out of these self-insurance arrangements as costs began to rise. Schalmont did not, but is trying to do so now, which is one of the sticking points in negotiations with its teachers’ union.
    What makes the plan so expensive? Well, Superintendent Valerie Kelsey advises me, it’s a “fairly rich plan.” Those who are covered by it can go to any doctor of their choice with no restrictions and with no distinction between “in network” or “out of network.”
    They are 100 percent covered for hospitalization, for 365 days of the year.
    There is no co-pay for doctor’s office visits.
    The co-pay for prescription medicines is a mere $3, regardless of the medicine.
    It doesn’t even include dental and eyeglass coverage, which is provided separately.
    Actually, only about 10 percent of Schalmont’s active teachers — 24 out of 240 — participate in this “fairly rich” plan, most of them opting instead for MVP or CDPHP plans, which are also offered and which cost the district about $12,000 per family.
    The reason that more teachers don’t opt for the Cadillac plan is, presumably, that since they contribute 5 percent of the cost of their coverage, the other plans are more economical for them, 5 percent of $12,000 being somewhat less than 5 percent of $28,000.
    But 88 retired teachers get the coverage as well, and half of them make no contribution at all, since whatever deal was in effect for them at the time of their retirement is locked in forever. They get it for life, at no cost to them.
    This is by way of follow-up to my earlier analysis of why our school taxes are so high. They are so high because the state Legislature, faithful servant to the publicemployee unions, mandates that whatever was given once must be given forever.
    The employer can never get out of any commitment, no matter how much circumstances might change, unless the union agrees. And ordinarily no union agrees unless it is given something of equivalent value, the shorthand for which is, you can have it back, but you gotta pay for it.
    Superintendent Kelsey tells me that the Schalmont administration and the teachers’ union, deadlocked in negotiations, are endeavoring to determine even now the dollar value of this anachronistic insurance plan with a view to scrapping it and switching to a cheaper Blue Cross plan.
    But whatever it’s worth, the school district will have to pay in some other coin, so even getting rid of it will yield no immediate savings.
    This is something else you might keep in mind the next time you see a picture of Schalmont teachers with picket signs claiming (falsely) they have no contract.
    If they had no contract, they would have no $28,000 insurance plan, that’s for sure.

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But 88 retired teachers get the coverage as well, and half of them make no contribution at all, since whatever deal was in effect for them at the time of their retirement is locked in forever. They get it for life, at no cost to them.