The South Burlington, Vermont schools are closed indefinitely as teachers walk picket lines, accusing the school board of not negotiating in good faith. But the school board claims the teachers’ union is at fault.
Teachers in the South Burlington school district manned picket lines instead of classrooms beginning Tuesday after negotiations over their labor contract failed to resolve health care and salary issues.
South Burlington High School teacher Eric Stone is lead negotiator for the South Burlington Educators Association, the union representing the teachers. Stone says there have been several unsuccessful attempts to resolve the contract in the past few weeks. “The school board had an opportunity to negotiate and literally walked out of those negotiations stating that they were unprepared and then waited four days to give us a counterproposal via e-mail. The board knew that we had voted to take a strike on Tuesday and that put everything into a last-minute frenzy. Even though the board stated they weren’t willing to meet we sent them a proposal via e-mail in an attempt to reach an agreement. But unfortunately they’ve chosen to not come back to the table. They’ve manufactured excuses as to why they can’t do that. All they need to do is get back to the table, reach a fair and reasonable settlement and all of this will be over.”
The union on Tuesday also filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the Vermont Labor Relations Board claiming bad faith bargaining by the school board and stalling tactics in order to delay reaching a settlement.
The South Burlington School Board Clerk stands in if the chair is unavailable and signs individual teacher contracts. Martin LaLonde says the board made clear to the union when it offered a counterproposal that it would be unable to meet until Thursday. LaLonde says it’s disingenuous to suggest that the board walked out of any sessions. “The association has also suggested we were unprepared to negotiate. Which is also misconstruing what occurred on October 6th. Despite not having an attorney that we’ve been using, he was unavailable. But we thought it was important enough to definitely attend. The board went into executive session, while they waited, and looked at and discussed that counterproposal. We went back and explained we needed more time and we were going to provide them a counterproposal. Now if you want to construe that as we were unprepared to negotiate and we walked out, I don’t think that’s a fair construction of what happened.”
LaLonde says negotiations have centered around health care coverage concessions and the union’s counterproposals have not been acceptable. “The association was insistent on keeping their current health care plan. We decided to concede that point. However we asked for some concessions based on the fact that that health care plan was going to have significant additional costs. Those concessions were a lower salary increase than what they wanted, an additional contribution to the premium for the health care and shifting the money that we put on the table somewhat to the less experienced teachers. The association’s response made no serious concessions.”
A bargaining session is scheduled for 2 p.m. Thursday afternoon.
Teachers had been working without a contract since the end of June. 2373 students are enrolled in the five schools of the South Burlington school district.
