The School Committee approved contracts, for the second time, for six bargaining units Monday night.
The contracts, retroactive to July 1, 2011, were approved last week, then tabled to allow both school and union officials to review the language before voting for final approval.
Mayor Daniel M. Knapik said this morning that the issue was the effective dates of the retroactive pay for the past year and the effective date of the contract. Originally the retro active date was Friday, June 29 and the effective date of the contract was Saturday, June 30.
“We can’t pay (the retroactive salary) before the effective date of the contract, so everything was changed to June 29,” Knapik said.
The School Committee also approved a $10,000 retirement incentive for Unit A, the teachers, to be paid over a three-year period as part of the school administration effort to close an $860,000 budget gap.
Knapik said the idea of the retirement incentive is to provide teachers at that high-end of the salary scale an incentive to retire, replacing some of those positions with teachers earning $40,000.
“The delta there is about $23,000 in savings after paying the incentive,” he said.
“It’s a fair deal,” said Westfield Education Association President Lori Hovey of the contract Monday. “There was collaboration and we worked together. I’m sure there was more that both sides would have liked, but we all compromised.”
Hovey said everyone eligible for a step will receive one, and the one percent retroactive raise for the past year and one percent raise next year was acceptable, however, there was one area the teachers were not happy with in the contract.
“We’re not pleased with our health insurance,” said Hovey. “The city will say it will cost less as far as premiums go, but we now have a deductible, which we never had in the past.”
School Superintendent Suzanne Scallion said this morning that the district’s largest budget item is salaries, which account for more than 85 percent of the total budget.
“Attrition is my #1 goal,” Scallion said. “We’re looking at all positions to see if we can move another teacher into a slot or leave it vacant.
“I’m trying to avoid sending out more pink slips than is absolutely necessary because I want to avoid putting people through that emotional wringer,” Scallion said.
Many districts typically send out layoff notices before the final budget numbers are known, notifying twice as many teachers as the final layoff number.
“I don’t want to lose qualified people who get that notice and find another job, people who have to put food on the table for their families, pay the mortgage,” Scallion said.
Scallion is focused on balancing the budget, but not at the expense of students.
“I want to keep class sizes small, not have to cut programs such as AP (Advanced Placement) and keep highly qualified teachers in the classrooms,” she said.
The biggest hit to the school budget this year was the termination of a federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant and a reduction in the federal Tittle 1, a funding cut of more than $2 million.
