GUILDERLAND — The school district has negotiated new contracts with two bargaining units, both of which were formed by mergers of existing units.

One of these is an administrators’  unit, created from one previously existing unit of assistant principals and house principals and another of instructional supervisors such as the supervisor of music or of English as a second language, said Lin Severance, the district’s assistant superintendent for human resources.

The other is a merger of maintenance mechanics, custodial staff, and food service workers with teacher aids and monitors that is now known as the Guilderland Support Staff Association.

The three-year contracts with both units are retroactive and run from July 1, 2015 through June 30, 2018. All nine board members backed the support-staff contract. Vice President Christopher McManus abstained from voting on the administrators’ contract, as his wife, Ann-Marie McManus, is an assistant principal at the high school; the other eight board members ratified the contract.

Discussions with both units, Severance said, were cordial and oriented toward problem-solving. “Both of them were pretty complicated,” she said, “even just in terms of the merging of two unions.” In addition, she said, each unit naturally wanted to improve starting salaries and benefits for their members.”

Severance and Assistant Superintendent for Business Neil Sanders represented the district. “We understand what they were trying to accomplish, and we tried to accommodate it, while staying within the parameters that the board has given  us,” Severance said.

Administrators earn $82.4K minimum

There are now 16 people in the administrators’ association, which is affiliated with the School Administrators Association of New York State, Severance said.

A minimum salary was set for administrators in the unit. This minimum, of $82,418, is competitive with other school districts and represents an increase from last year’s minimum of $81,200, she said.

In the first year of the contract, Severance said, administrators will receive an increase of $750 to their base salary. They will receive an additional increase of $500 to their base pay, in the second and third years. In addition, they will receive an increase of 2.35 percent in each of the three years.

Actual year-one salaries range from $82,418 to $115,963. In the third and final year of the contract, they will range from $87,373 to $122,513.

While Guilderland teachers pay 20 percent of their health insurance costs, even before merging, both groups — principals and instructional supervisors — had been paying 22 percent.

The chief negotiators from the administrators’ association, Michael Piscatelli and William Aube, met with the district eight times. “I don’t think that any of their requests were unreasonable,” Severance said. “Previously, our administrators had not been keeping pace with other districts in the area,” she continued. “They were falling behind their peers. There was a recognition of that, and we tried to help them bridge that gap.”

Piscitelli, who is the instructional administrator for math, science, and technology at the high school, said simply, ‘We thought the agreement was fair for both sides.” Piscitelli was president of the instructional administrators’ group before the merger, he said, and the newly formed group has not yet decided who its officers will be.

Piscitelli declined to specify what percentage of the unit’s members voted for the contract, or what issues members were happier or less happy about.

New support staff unit has 121 members

In 2015, maintenance mechanics, custodial staff, and food service workers seceded from the Guilderland Employees Association, said Severance.

“We already had 12 units, and we did not want to have 13,” she said. So officials suggested that employees in those three areas find another, existing unit with which to merge. The workers who had seceded decided on merging with teacher aids and monitors, forming a unit with 121 members.

Merging the complicated contracts of these two groups was “quite a challenge,” Severance said. The discussions about contracts started in January and continued regularly for about six months, she said, before any negotiations began. “Anything that required a negotiation, or that led to a monetary discussion, we saved that for the true negotiation process,” she explained.

They then met seven more times for the actual negotiations.

Both the groups that merged to form this unit had been working outside of contract, she said. Their contracts had expired on June 30, 2015. So the conditions that were negotiated will be retroactive to July 1, 2015.

The two contracts were very different, and each group wanted to keep the arrangements that they had more or less unchanged, so the details that the district negotiated with each were different, Severance said.

Both groups work on a stepped system, increasing pay for each year of work.

Maintenance mechanics, custodial staff, and food service workers will receive 1.0 percent increases on each step in their current schedule the first year; 1.2 percent on each step the second year; and 1.4 percent on each step in the third year of the contract.

Aids and monitors, she said, will receive 15 cents per hour added to each step, each year.

And any individuals who are off-step — in other words, above the top step, 15 — will receive 25 cents added to the hourly rate for each year of the contract.

At the beginning of the first year, aids and monitors will make $9.80 per hour. Fifteen cents will be added to each year, she said, so that those who begin employment at the third year of the contract will make $10.10 when they start.

Those who are in step 15, she said, will make $14.88 in the year 2015-16. By the third year of the contract, people in this step would make $15.18.

Severance outlined the pay scale for the seceded workers who joined the unit:

—A Step 1 cook in 2015-16 was to receive $11.93 per hour; in the third year this will rise to $12.24. The highest level, a Step 10 cook, will receive $17.89 in 2015-16, and, the third year, $18.35;

—A Step 1 food-service worker was to receive $11.15  per hour in the first year, and $11.44 in the third. A Step 10 food service worker would start at $14.96 and end at $15.35;

—Step 1 custodial workers and messengers were set to receive $13.20 at first and $13.55 at the end. Step 10 custodial workers and messengers were to receive $19.91 at first and $20.43 the third year;

—Step 1 custodians, maintenance mechanics, and groundskeepers were to receive $16.31 in year one and $16.74 in year three; and

—Step 10 custodians, maintenance mechanics, and groundskeepers were to receive $23.97 in year one, and $24.60 in year three.

Aids and monitors have seen a great improvement this time around in their health-insurance benefits, Severance said.

The maintenance mechanics and custodial staff previously had health insurance during retirement, but aids and monitors did not, she said. Aids and monitors had health insurance during their active working career, but not once retired.

The big “get” in this contract, she said, was the provision of health insurance as a retirement benefit. This was a huge accomplishment for this group in this negotiation, Severance said.

Everyone in this unit will now be eligible for health insurance in retirement, she said, and their contribution is 20 percent.

The key negotiators for this unit, she said, were John Lawrence, Mike Liegot, and Art DelSignore. Also present was Mike Rowan with New York State United Teachers, with which the unit is affiliated.

“I think everyone was professional, open, and honest,” said Art DelSignore, who is a monitor at the high school and vice president of the unit. He said that about 80 percent of the unit’s members voted for the contract.

Everyone in the unit had to get to know one another, DelSignore said, despite being spread over different schools and in different jobs.

Then the process of negotiation with the school was “painstaking” and complicated, he said, and involved, first, going over the contracts of each type of worker, line by line, to find the language that could be relevant to all the different categories of workers, to put together a framework for the contract before any financial negotiations could take place.

In addition to the unit’s leadership and the NYSUT representative, he said, one member from each of the different job categories was present throughout the creation of the contract.

DelSignore said that he was pleased that the contract is retroactive.

He said that he thought that the district gave members what they could with the resources they had available. Everyone was treated fairly and received an increase, he said.

“We wouldn’t take any steps backward,” DelSignore said.

“I thought we negotiated in good faith and got the best benefits possible,” he added. “I think an 80-percent vote shows that most members agreed.”