Teachers, UCF district face no-win situation

Both sides need to seek lest awful option in contract talks

By Mike McGann, Editor, The Times

You can’t really call it a war of words — it’s more like a pillow fight of words.

The rhetoric of the last week or so between the Unionville-Chadds Ford Education Association and the UCF Board of Education over the ongoing contract talks has amounted to dialogue only a little elevated beyond the “you’re a stinkhead” arguments my kids (now worldly eighth graders at Patton Middle School) used to have in their elementary school days.

Neither side has particularly been on point in messaging, as we used to say back in my political days. 

The teachers are coming across as, well, a bit whiny, complaining about when the district’s press briefing was — and how difficult that was, being in the morning during school hours. While I won’t speak for any other publications, we reached out to union leadership at noon and waited about 25 hours for a response before finally publishing — and we did get a copy of the union’s response presentation and quoted from it to make sure both sides points of view were represented.

Honestly, I’m not seeing this as such a big issue.

The board of education, on the other hand, picked a lousy time to give Assistant to The Superintendent of Schools Ken Batchelor an 8% raise at the same time it is telling teachers they can only have about 2% (and in the latter case, that’s total cost — not just salary). And yes, I buy the argument that Batchelor is essentially filling two positions and is in demand as a potential superintendent in other districts, because it is true, I’ve seen it first hand. I’m not overly troubled by Batchelor’s raise — about a quarter of the district’s administration has been eliminated in five years — just the timing seems really tone deaf.

Maybe we’re seeing this focus on lesser points because there isn’t a good answer for the bigger problems — no one is going to win here — and this is some sort of sturm und drang to convince both sides of the argument that a vigorous fight has been waged. Bonus points for the Goethe reference, right?

Even in a prosperous high-achieving district such as Unionville-Chadds Ford, depending largely on real estate taxes to fund education — especially with limits on those tax rates — is a slow road to dismantling public education.

Long term, if the state does not return to funding schools about 50% of the of costs of educating students (it’s around 31% on average today and far less for wealthy districts such as UCF) as it did a generation ago, the contentious issues seen today will worsen. Philadelphia, Chester-Upland and other failed districts are merely canaries in a coal mine.

While the blame can be spread among many (from your beloved state legislators, feckless governors from both parties, special interests on the left and right to a monied few who stand to benefit from weakening or even outright collapse of the public schools: those who operate for-profit and largely unregulated charter schools) the state’s current financial situation and likely political gridlock make it unlikely that the downward spiral of public education in Pennsylvania is going to be reversed anytime soon.

Until school districts and teachers unions (and parents) begin to see their shared interest in taking on the state government — instead of battling each other over an increasingly smaller piece of the educational pie — this isn’t a situation that’s going to get better.

For this contract and maybe the next couple, expect the same three major thorny issues to dominate.

Let’s break down the three fundamental issues here:

The pension mess: this issue has a multiplier effect. Aside from a rate spike that will be coming in each of the next few years were salaries to be flat, any pay hikes immediately boost the district’s pension contributions and it compounds over the next few years. In back of the envelope terms, for this coming contract, add in an extra .30 or more for every dollar of added salary, on a compounding basis. While that’s not entirely the district’s fault, it did benefit from paying next to nothing into the pension fund for some years back in the early 2000s and didn’t cut taxes or stash money for a rainy day. That’s a bit like paying the minimum on a large credit card bill for a couple of years, as it tends to cause problems down the road.

From the teachers’ standpoint, they have some reason to feel that this issue is being unfairly dumped on their heads, as they were paying a minimum of 7.5% of salary (and some even more) into the pension fund throughout all of this.

Where there is some culpability is that the parent organization of the UCFEA, the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA) bought into to the pension deal at the time, pretty darn enthusiastically, as I recall, as they were “bought off” with changes to the vesting rules. Even a few years later, when I was running for State Representative in 2004, PSEA representatives looked at me glassy-eyed when I asked why during an endorsement meeting and whether they were concerned about pension shortfalls if the economy slowed.

So while the individual teachers probably have an argument on the issue, the organization and it’s hired-gun negotiators are talking a bit out of both sides of their mouths. Of course, the same could be said of local legislators who voted for the pension deal in 2001 and now kind of just shrug about it and move right on to demanding that teachers be enrolled in 401(K) style plans instead of pensions, even as new estimates show the majority of folks with 401(K) plans won’t have nearly enough to retire on and will likely become a public welfare crisis in the coming years.

Obviously, the best answer would be a focused and energized state legislature working with a new governor to get something meaningful done about funding the pension mess.

I know. Stop laughing. The situation is kind of hopeless.

Gov. Tom Wolf’s plan to fund pensions through “modernization” of the state liquor stores is both politically and mathematically unlikely. Legislative leaders have plans and talking points, but don’t seem to grasp the actual math. The powers that be in Harrisburg have little motivation to do much of anything beyond talk — losing a legislative seat now takes something akin to an act of God — so real pension relief is unlikely.

That means the district and teachers will have to find ways to split the difference here and find the least awful option.

Salary: Aside from the pension issue, an increase in salary is a sticky issue. Thanks to Act 1, districts are put in a revenue box. Taxes can only be raised so much, so salaries can only be raised by small amounts without cutting programs or neglecting buildings or safety. The numbers are the numbers — again, this is as designed by the state legislature — if you don’t like it, let them know.

Now, an argument can be made the total compensation increases — which includes the cost of pension contribution spikes — could fit within Act 1’s 2015-16 base rate of 1.9%. The district wants to keep it within Act 1 with no exceptions, while the teachers’ union is arguing for a number above Act 1 plus exceptions. The problem is that the state legislature and former Gov. Tom Corbett locked the exceptions in based on 2011-12 salary numbers, in essence phasing them out, even as the pension contributions spike in the coming years.

If a district agrees to too much of a pay hike, it could be setting itself up for program cuts and layoffs down the road. Essentially, the state imposed a salary cap on teachers, even if no one entirely understood it at the time (once again, the PSEA was kind of caught napping).

Again, there’s no good answer here.

Benefits: This is one that might be tough for the average citizen to see eye to eye with the teaching staff on. As small business owners, my wife and I pay — and and it kills me to type this — some $24,000 a year for health insurance for our family — and yes it’s very similar to the top package offered to teachers through Independence Blue Cross. We don’t get an employer contribution — so we know what this costs in real, out-of-pocket dollars. Even assuming that the district is able to get better numbers because of its size — health care benefits are insanely expensive.

In the commercial world, employees are being expected to shoulder more and more of the cost of benefits, vastly more than public employees. So, for the average taxpayer, it’s a tough ask for teachers not to make the same sacrifices we in the general public are making.

For there to be any room to work on salary, the cost of benefits need to be contained and teachers need to be willing to offer something here.

So where is the final deal?

In the range between 2.9% and 3.2% per year in total compensation — above the Act 1 base rate, but in the ballpark with exceptions. A bit of tidy branding — say calling any increase above 1.9% a “pension tax” and crediting our local legislators with the tax hike — might finally direct community angst toward our “beloved” local legislators, who probably deserve the most blame for the situation and lack of progress in fixing it.

Anything more, and the district will be hamstrung — don’t assume that the arguments on program cuts and layoffs aren’t based in reality.

Anything less and the teachers won’t agree. As a group, they feel that they have worked with the district, shared the pain when it was asked and shouldn’t have to continue to bear the burden of issues caused by others. Especially as Unionville-Chadds Ford is such a high performing district, the teachers as a group feel somewhat disrespected and they need something that at least sounds and feels like a win to save face. Hopefully, the district and the board of education don’t underestimate this factor.

The worry is that if the district and board or the teachers dig in too deeply, we could see imposition of another “status quo” situation — where teachers only work to the contract, see a pay freeze and students suffer (cancelled after school activities and field trips), as was the case in 2011.

A strike?

That would be the worst outcome and one that should be seen as a failure on the part of both sides.

There’s a deal to be made here. It’s not an easy one or a comfortable one, but one that can keep the community together. At the end of the day, we all have to live here together and work together to find the least awful option.

Let’s hope both sides find the wisdom to do so.

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