School negotiations to be key

One of the largest cost reductions required to fill the estimated $24 million shortfall for the 2011-12 school year for the Eugene School District will be decided this spring when district officials sit down at the bargaining table beginning April 13 to seek concessions from the Eugene Education Association that represents almost 1,000 teachers in the district.

Or maybe it won’t be decided.

Not if both sides fail to reach agreement by the end of the current fiscal year on June 30.

Voter passage of a city income tax on the May 17 ballot, which would give the Eugene School District an estimated $12 million and the Bethel School District an estimated $4.8 million after taxes are collected in 2012, would be of great help to the cash-strapped district.

But a big part of the $24 million in cost-saving recommendations the school board voted on Feb. 2 — part of Superintendent George Russell’s three-year “sustainable budget” plan — would come in the form of an estimated $5.5 million to $10 million in compensation concessions from all the district’s employees.

To get there, though, the district will need to negotiate concessions from employees that could come as pay freezes, lower-than-promised pay increases, health care cuts or freezes, or unpaid furlough days.

The district already sent out “notices of anticipated layoff” to 109 teachers (11 percent of staff) at the end of February as another cost-saving measure.

“If we don’t achieve the (compensation concession) recommendations by the board, as presented by the superintendent, then there is the possibility of greater layoffs,” the district’s director of human resources, Celia Feres-Johnson, said.

The district can’t unilaterally impose compensation concessions, although it can unilaterally cut jobs.

Eugene teachers are in the first year of a three-year contract written last June, but the contract allows either party to “re-open” negotiations to bargain salary, insurance benefits, step increases or length of the work year. As part of the current contract, the union agreed to cut seven paid days (six of them instructional school days) for teachers for this school year, and also conceded seven paid days for the 2009-10 school year, to help the district balance its 2009-10 budget. That gave teachers a 185-day paid school year, when the district’s status quo has typically been 192 days. Teachers also got only half their usual 3.7 percent step increase in the first year of the current contract. Step increases are awarded based on the number of years a teacher has worked.

Now, the district will again ask employees for concessions.

In addition to the teacher’s union, the district will seek compensation concessions this spring from its three other employee groups, classified workers (whose four-year contract expires Sept. 30), as well as administrators and substitute teachers, whose current contracts expire June 30.

“We are again asking them to give up compensation in order to preserve jobs,” associate human resources director and lead negotiator Christine Nesbit said.

One bit of good news for the district’s projected budget shortfall is a proposed increase in state funding for schools — up slightly from what Gov. John Kitzhaber originally projected in January — announced last week by the co-chairmen of the Legislature’s Joint Ways and Means Committee.

Kitzhaber had said in January that $5.56 billion would be available for state funding of schools during the 2011-13 biennium, but the number proposed last Tuesday for school funding was $5.7 billion. The Eugene School District based it’s $24 million shortfall projection on the $5.56 billion number. School officials, who met in closed session Friday with the Eugene School Board to discuss the upcoming negotiations with the teacher’s union, would not comment on whether the new state numbers would affect the district’s projected shortfall.

The district would like to secure concessions as soon as possible and not have negotiations drag past June 30.

“It’s our goal that we come to agreement as quickly as possible and benefit the students and the employees of our district,” Human Resources Administrator Jeralynn Beghetto said.

The union, meanwhile, realizing how the proposed city income tax could affect the equation, may not be in a hurry.

“Definitely, we are interested in what happens there,” Tom Di Liberto, a Monroe Middle School teacher and the union’s bargaining chairman, said of the income tax vote. “It’s possible we could be finished (bargaining) before then. I just don’t know.”

The district first approached the union in December about re-opening talks. But the union said it was not ready to bargain until the district’s financial picture became clearer. Meeting before the school board voted on Russell’s recommendations on Feb. 2 “would have been impossible,” Di Liberto said. “So it’s not like we’ve been dragging our heels.”