NEW SCOTLAND — The school board last week adopted a teachers’ contract nearly a year after the previous agreement expired.

“We do have an agreement,” said Voorheesville Teachers’ Association President Kathy Fiero. The new three-year contract will run through June 2018.

“It was a cordial and professional negotiation,” Fiero said. “The tax cap has become a huge concern in negotiations.”

Four years ago, the state adopted a law that requires the tax levy be under two percent or the cost of living, whichever is less; this year, the consumer price index was close to zero, meaning that, in order to stay under the cap, schools can hardly raise taxes at all, next year.

The Voorheesville School Board last week also approved next year’s budget at $23,796,334, with a tax levy increase of $153,000, or 0.9 percent — under the state-set tax cap.  

“The tax cap is creating a lot of pressure” for both drafting the district budget and affecting “the ability to negotiate a contract people are satisfied with,” Fiero told The Enterprise. “People are concerned about the cost of living, and the erosion due to health-insurance increases.”

“There were two main areas that we compromised on,” said Superintendent Brian Hunt. “The main point of balance was between the salary increase and the increased payments the teachers will make for health benefits.”

Teachers in Voorheesville have built-in step increases, with teachers advancing a step per year they work, up to step 25, Fiero said. The built-in salary increases range from 2.25 to 2.5 percent; the total agreement for salary adjustment under the new contract is about 3 percent, she said.

“We only got half of a percent of new money,” Fiero explained. Teachers had hoped for an increase above 3 percent, she said, naming 3.5 percent as a goal.

Teachers agreed to a 1-percent increase in health-insurance costs each year — 16 percent the first year of the contract, 17 percent the next year, and 18 percent the final year — and the agreement is retroactive to 2015; teachers will pay back that extra 1 percent from the retroactive salary increase they receive for 2015, Fiero said.

“The district is concerned about having our employees contribute to health coverage at a higher rate to protect the district against escalating health costs,” Hunt said. “That had to be balanced with the salary increases.”

Teachers voted, 50 to 44, to approve the contract, Fiero said. The union covers 104 faculty members.

“That’s a close vote, closer than I’m comfortable with,” she said. A straight majority was needed to accept the contract, she said.

The teachers were pleased with staffing decisions, she said.

“No jobs were lost. All the staff is preserved,” Fiero said.

Also, class sizes were negotiated down, she said. Previously, classes for kindergarten through third grade could have 27 students, and classes for fourth and fifth grades could have up to 30 students, she said.

Under the new contract, there is “a definitive class size,” Fiero said. “People were happy with the language improvements,” she said. All class sizes in kindergarten through fifth grade were capped at 27 students.

“We were... able to make some changes in language,” Hunt told The Enterprise,  “that will benefit teachers, such as the class size limits, which are now mandatory, and a stipend paid to teachers teaching an extra class.”

Teachers and the school board also agreed to set maximum class sizes at 30 students for the middle and high schools, Hunt said at April’s school board meeting. For example, the current fifth grade, with 102 students, would have 25 or 26 students if the district keeps a four-section schedule, he said. Administrators may adjust the schedule before next year, he told The Enterprise last week, after parents shared concerns about class sizes.

“Next year’s fifth-grade class will be large,” Fiero said. She said that parents had asked if sixth- and seventh-grade teachers could work together to handle alternating class sizes, with seventh-grade teachers helping with sixth-grade enrichment classes, and vice versa, depending on which years had larger student populations.

Fiero said that the “board made a commitment to work” with teachers.

“Five classes is considered a full teaching load,” she said. Having other teachers help with enrichment classes for class sizes that leave teachers at the limit of courses they can teach, Fiero said, concerned the district, as expressed by the board at its meeting last week. The middle and high schools share staff, Fiero said. Assigning high school staff to help with larger student populations in middle school classes could reduce the amount of enrichment classes available at the high school, she said.

School board President Timothy Blow, at April’s school board meeting, likened the trade in staff to “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

Also at the school board meeting, the board thanked Fiero for her work during the contract negotiations.

Fiero told The Enterprise that no outside mediator was used to negotiate the contract.

The second compromise the district made, Hunt told The Enterprise, was to provide “flexibility for teachers to take sick time either as family or personal; no increase in the number of sick days, but flexibility on the employee's part to take the time they need to take care of themselves and their families.”