On January 28, the Newton Teachers Association (NTA) presented a proposal, the School Committee presented a counterproposal, and in the evening the NTA presented its second proposal of the day. Each party, through its own press conference, expressed frustration, exasperation, and a belief that the other side was not bargaining in good faith. Leaders of both teams indicated that although they started the day with hope of reaching an agreement, those hopes diminished during the day. The Teachers Strike remains in place, and schools will be closed on Monday, January 29.
NTA Proposal with 3:30PM Deadline
At 1:30PM, the NTA said that as of 1PM, it had “presented the School Committee with a new, comprehensive, compromise package that would settle this deal today.” The NTA set a deadline of 3:30PM for the School Committee to sign the NTA’s proposed MOA (Memorandum of Agreement) to ensure that schools would be open on Monday.
The NTA had claimed that its proposal “holds fast to our commitment to address urgent student needs and educator working conditions, while presenting numerous compromises across our proposals to address the financial concerns of the School Committee.”
When asked about how this new NTA proposal would address financial concerns of the School Committee, an NTA spokesperson told Fig City News that the proposal calls for several changes — Unit C working hours, caps on class sizes, and number of additional full-time regular education social workers — to be phased-in over the years of the proposed contract.
The Newton Public Schools (NPS) said that this proposal from the NTA “showed progress but was neither affordable nor sustainable,” and “accepting it wholesale would have required a reduction in force of more than 70 valued educators and support staff throughout the life of the contract.”
School Committee Counterproposal
The School Committee issued a counterproposal at 3:15PM that NPS said “included increases to COLA, agreement on parental leave, increases to the wages of all paraprofessionals, and a commitment by the superintendent to increase the number of social workers across the district, as well as a revised transition to offset increases to health insurance costs.” Later, NPS explained that its proposal included:
- A compounded COLA of 11.7% over the life of the contract
- An aggregate increase in educator wages of 21.4% over the life of the contact
- 60 days of paid parental leave for all employees, which accepted the NTA’s terms
- Increases in hours and starting wages for aides
NPS said that within a few minutes of receiving the School Committee’s counterproposal, “The NTA bargaining team stated [that the NTA’s] package proposal ‘was take it or leave it,’ and walked out of the room without any discussion or negotiation. This was not bargaining in good faith.”
At 4PM, the NTA declared that the School Committee had rejected the package proposal and NTA members would be on picket lines on Monday. It also issued a statement saying, “The NTA did not walk away from bargaining. We received no clarifying questions from the school committee. Instead they gave us a counter proposal, in essence rejecting ours.”
School Committee Press Conference
At a 5:30PM press conference (NewTV video), School Committee Chair Chris Brezski said:
- “We were back in the room at 3:15 to give them that counterproposal, and [within five minutes] we didn’t get a word out before they cut us off and walked out of the room.”
- “We haven’t heard from the union since they walked out of the room.”
- “We are still in the building. We are ready to negotiate at any moment. All we need is a partner to negotiate with.”
- “[This morning] after a productive day yesterday, for the first time, it felt like they really wanted to get a deal done. …Sometime after noon, they dumped a 36-page MOA on us and said, ‘You have two hours to come back and agree to it, take it or leave it.’ At that point, I wasn’t as hopeful any more. …We’re $26 million apart over the life of the contract. …We could have gotten this done in any two days over the last six months, if we had a partner to negotiate with.”
NPS said that the School Committee bargaining team would “remain at the Ed Center and await the NTA’s return to the bargaining table, so we can get our students back to school.”
NTA Press Conference
At its press conference at 7:30PM (NewTV video), the NTA said that, minutes earlier, it had sent a second proposal to the School Committee and would be returning to the Education Center for possible continuation of negotiations.
NTA spokesperson Ryan Normandin said:
- “Today we presented them with a complete package of proposals that addresses the concerns the School Committee had raised, …would meet the threshold of what our membership would ratify, and would return our kids to school tomorrow. We did everything they asked. We dropped our cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) over 4% over four years. We phased-in our proposals over the four-year contract. We saved them millions of dollars.”
- “They accepted everything that was conciliatory, everything we were giving up, and plastered ‘Reject’ on everything else. …And so, we said, ‘We’ll review it downstairs,’ and we got up and left. And we reviewed it downstairs.”
NTA President Mike Zilles explained that the NTA’s 3:30PM deadline had been based on a timeline to allow opening of schools the next day. He said at the NTA press conference that an agreement on the MOA would be needed by 3:30PM to allow time for subsequent tasks — such as negotiating a return-to-work agreement — that he said were necessary before declaring an end to the strike by 7PM so that NPS could announce a reopening of schools in time for families to prepare. (In the School Committee’s press conference, Brezski did not refer to any timeline explanation by Zilles and said that an announcement of school reopening would usually be made by 7:30PM but could be as late as 8:30PM.)
Zilles said that the School Committee’s latest proposal has a cumulative cost of COLA that is $15 million lower than the COLA cost of the NTA’s mid-day proposal over the life of the contract, and he noted that this difference was a very small percentage of the City’s cumulative budget of $2 billion over those four years.
Bruce Henderson and Amy Sangiolo contributed reporting for this article.
