Big Problem at RBRHS Needs Speedy Resolution

There is a serious problem growing at RBRHS, and it needs attention very quickly. That problem is the stalemate over negotiations on a contract for the teaching staff. Like most problems, the best way to find a solution is to look at the cause of the matter.

The immediate reason for the current stalemate is that the teachers union has walked away from the bargaining table and sought mediation help from the State. There can be no settlement if one of the parties refuses to talk to the other side. Instead, all negotiation must be held at the strict timetable set by the State, and no amount of posturing or complaint can change that. Hopefully, they will return to the table and something can be resolved as soon as possible. But that is just the surface issue.

Right up front, it needs to be stated clearly that these negotiations are not a textbook “labor vs management” dispute. The teachers are indeed ‘labor’, but the local Board of Education is not economically ‘management’, charged with a business owner’s mentality of keeping wages down and profits up. There are no profits in a school district, and business analogies badly fail to make sense in this context. The Board members are nothing other than representatives of the voters who “own” the school district, which is the way our republican form of government operates. They act as conduits for the voter’s will, plain and simple. If they fail to do so, the will be voted off the Board by the populace. Consequently, they have no desire or motivation to hinder a rapid resolution.

This is an issue that the teachers have stated repeatedly has gotten worse since 2010, and I believe they are absolutely correct in that judgment. But why? The real roots for the stalemate lie much deeper than just a difference in positions, and they deserve a closer look. That requires a short review of recent New Jersey history. In 2008, the country underwent the most traumatic economic disaster since the Great Depression of 1930s. Most residents of the RBR community, like the rest of the state and country, suffered terrible economic losses. Prior to that, a school district could be prudent with its expenditures, and seek the funding for increased costs in budgets it proposed to its citizens. But the financial meltdown, when coupled with increasingly high property taxes, led the citizens to revolt. In 2010, voters in an unprecedented 58% of school districts in NJ rejected the school budgets presented to them. This emboldened the Governor to exhort voters to pressure teacher unions to freeze their contracts. In 2011, the State created a new rule that allowed districts to move the date school budgets were voted on from the traditional April vote, which isolated the voting to solely school related ballots, to the general elections in November. It also mandated that, if the district kept to a 2% cap on budget increases, the school budget did not have to be voted on by the citizenry of the district.

The result? 93% of the state’s districts moved to a November vote date, the vast majority choosing to stay under a 2% increase, and fully 80% of the budgets voted passed in 2011. The message of the citizens had been delivered loud and clear - Keep your budget increases under 2%! With teacher salary and benefits representing about 2/3s of the school budget, that put tremendous pressure on the size of salary increases Boards were able to budget for.

There was another, much more compelling change made in 2011 though. The Governor pushed through a law – Chapter 78 – that required the teachers to begin contributing to the cost of their healthcare benefits, in an increasing percentage schedule. The districts still pay for about 70% of the healthcare costs, which rise much faster than a modest 2%, cutting into funding elsewhere in the district’s programs such as sports and extra curricular activities. Given the effective 2% limitation on budget increases, which in turn has led to generally lower teacher salary increases across the state (also mirroring the reduced economic recovery of NJ) in the past five years, this Chapter 78 contribution has seriously eroded the salary gains teachers have received in this time period. Coupled with the low but steady rate of inflation, and it is fair to say that many of the lower paid, newer hired teachers in the past decade have seen either no real wage increases or actual drops in their buying power since 2010. That is a heart-wrenching reality no one likes to see. (The union could ameliorate that problem to some degree by modifying how it distributes salary raises across its Salary Guide, but historically has always shortchanged those in the early portion of their career to reward those farther along on the Guide. That does not bear upon the current negotiations though.)

So the real core reason for a stalemate is the thorny issue of healthcare contributions eroding or wiping out teacher salary gains. The teachers union members are caught between rising healthcare contributions and smaller average salary increases. The Board of Education is caught between rising expenses of all sorts and a budget cap. Adding to the misery is a State that has essentially frozen its contributions to local districts at 2011 levels. It should be clear by now that the anger felt by these participants should not be directed at each other, but should be focused entirely upon the entities who created these circumstances: the State Legislature and the Governor. The rules they have put into place have effectively stolen ‘Home Rule’ from the RBR district citizens.

That is the cause of the problem. Now –what is the solution? There remains one fair and proper method to resolve this both now and into the future, and it is surprisingly simple and easy. The Board of Education should draw up its budget based on the parameters of a contract it can offer and stay within the 2% cap, which is what it has proposed in negotiations to date. It should then place on the November ballot an additional budget request, known as a “Second Question”, in which it asks the voters to approve funding for a contract that would reduce the teacher’s healthcare contributions to a nominal amount (currently set by law at a minimum of 1.5%) as well as a larger salary increase. Let the voters speak out plainly about whether they value their children’s educations enough to pay the teachers what the Board would like to give them, but are currently prohibited from doing. Let the voters accept the cost of that decision, which is only fair and right. And in doing so, return to the citizens of the district the right to run their school as they deem best.

As a matter of disclosure – I have been a resident of this district since 1957 (except for the six years I spent serving in the USMC); am a product of both the Little Silver schools from K-8, and RBRHS; saw both of my children graduate from those same schools; and until recently, sat on local Boards of Education for nearly ten years. I very strongly favor making sure our teachers get compensated for their efforts to the greatest degree possible, and strongly resent the State’s imposition of rules that impede us from doing just that.