Mt. View teachers rally for new contract

By Tom Fontana
Correspondent

Mt. View teachers staged their second contract rally of the school year Monday night, May 11.

About 50 members of the Mt. View Education Association (MVEA) paraded around the elementary school parking lot carrying signs expressing their frustration over the lack of progress toward a new contract with the district after nearly four years.

One sign — “We want to work with your team not your Tom” — indicated that the MVEA blames district board president Thomas Stoddard for being the major roadblock to an agreement. Stoddard also serves as chairman of the board’s contract negotiation team.

Last Oct. 27, the MVEA and supporters held a similar rally before a board meeting, and complained that a salary schedule created by Stoddard was unfair. Some directors admitted they didn’t understand how Stoddard’s plan worked, even though they had supported it.

After a contract negotiation meeting last month, MVEA members said they accepted the salary structure as proposed, but when the meeting resumed after a break, the district’s negotiating committee changed aspects of the structure that had been offered.

Stoddard has consistently defended his position by claiming that he hadn’t heard any objections to the salary structure from his fellow board members.

Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA) representatives attended the rally this past Monday night, and encouraged the MVEA members to continue to become more publicly vocal about their lack of a contract.

“I want Tom Stoddard to know that this rally is just a precursor of what’s to come,” PSEA Northeastern Pa. regional director John Holland told the teachers. “We’re going to get even louder and the board is going to hear you. If there’s anyone who should be speechless it should be Tom and his school board.”

PSEA negotiator Matt Gruenloh said Stoddard is blocking a new contract with his proposed salary structure.

“The main problem is that Stoddard is in love with his own math,” Gruenloh told the Independent. “He wants to throw out the traditional salary schedule used by most school districts, and use his own.”

The salary schedule determines wages for entry-level positions as well as wage increases based on years of service.

“The structure proposed by the board lowers entry-level salaries and slows their growth later,” Gruenloh explained. “It pinches the bottom of the wage scale and also pinches the top, in some cases giving teachers slower increases in wages over time.”

He added that the board is only offering a four- or five-year contract, which would be retroactive to when the current contract expired. “So a new contract would run out not long after it’s adopted,” Gruenloh predicted, “and we’ll be back in contract negotiations almost immediately.”

Gruenloh said he or other PSEA representatives attend contract meetings between MVEA and district negotiators, which are usually held once a month. Directors who represent the district at these meetings are Stoddard, Ellen Ahern, Michael Barhite, and Christine Plonski-Sezar.

“Teacher contract agreements are always basically about wages and health benefits,” Gruenloh said. “But in this case, the holdup is not so much the amounts, but how the numbers are determined based on the salary structure Stoddard wants.”

When the scheduled directors meeting began at 7 p.m., most of the teachers who marched around the parking lot crowded into the board room, but contract issues were not discussed during the meeting.