8th-Graders' Trip At Center of Teacher Contract Conflict in Point Pleasant

A popular eighth-grade trip to Washington, D.C., has become a flash point as the Point Pleasant Borough School District and its teachers union negotiate a new contract.

Superintendent of Schools Vincent S. Smith said the trip, which has been a district tradition for more than 40 years, will go on, despite rumors circulating in the district that the lack of a contract will upset those plans.

“We’re not going to let the kids suffer,” Smith said Monday night during the district’s Board of Education meeting at Ocean Road School, in response to a question from borough resident Jacquelyn Wieland, who said she’d heard the rumors that the trip might be off.

But Lorraine Griffin, the president of the Point Pleasant Education Association, said the trip is receiving a lukewarm response from the union’s membership.

“We took a poll of the middle school teachers and they aren’t willing to go, because this is outside the contract,” Griffin told the board. Teachers who go on the trip are not compensated for it, she said.

The last three-year contract between the teachers and the district expired June 30, and Griffin said negotiations on a new contract began in the spring. However, the sides have been unable to come to an agreement -- which Griffin said she has not seen in her 21 years of teaching in the district.

“There have been some struggles in the past, but it was always resolved,” she said.

The union has requested mediation, but how long that will take and how soon it might be resovled are uncertain.

The Washington trip, which is scheduled for late October, Griffin said, is three days and two nights and focuses on government. Parents make payments for the trip over the course of the students’ seventh grade year, and it has become something of a rite of passage.

“The kids talk about the trip years later, and talk about the school year in terms of ‘before Washington’ and ‘after Washington,’ “ she said.

Whether it could be rescheduled was unclear, Griffin said, because Washington is much more busy in the spring.
“This really is a perfect time of year to go,” Griffin said.

Neither side would say where the impasse lies, with Griffin saying only that the sides are “far apart,” and Smith saying, “Probably too much has been said already,” referring to comments made before the board went into executive session.

The statements about the Washington trip and the contract negotiations came at the end of what had been, until that time, an upbeat evening of presentations to students and board members, and including the announcement by Smith that the high school had risen 56 places in the biannual New Jersey Monthly rankings of high schools around the state.

“This is a reflection of the entire district,” Smith said in announcing the high school’s rise from 154 in 2012 to 98 in the 2014 rankings released earlier this month. “It begins at the elementary school level, laying the foundation for success.”

Wieland, who has two children in the district, urged the board to come to an agreement with the teachers soon.

“Everybody lives on a budget,” she said, echoing remarks of board president Ricardo Ruiz, who in replying to comments from another resident, said the board is trying to negotiate fairly, but has “a lot of constraints” on what it can and cannnot do.

“We take every opportunity to pate you on the back and acknowledge your value,” Ruiz said, addressing the audience.

“We have amazing teachers who go above and beyond,” Wieland said, addressing the board. “The community supports you in doing what you have to do to support our teachers.”