Contract receives resounding #039;no#039; vote
Published 12:00 am Saturday, April 6, 2002
Austin's public school teachers have voted down the tentative contract agreement reached last week between the Austin Education Association (AEA) and district representatives.
Members of the AEA voted Wednesday and Thursday on the proposed contract, which needed a two-thirds majority to ratify it, or 185 of the 279.8 teachers. Though the AEA won't release vote totals, Bob Riege, president of the union, said the tentative contract was "defeated by a substantial number of people."
The proposed contract would not have raised salaries or insurance costs for the teachers this year, but would have given them a 4 percent salary increase and required them to make co-payments of varying amounts, depending on the health plan they chose next year.
The tentative contract also reduced the number of teacher contract days from 194 days to 192 days, though the number of contact days with students will remain at 178 days. Additionally, it reduced the number of days teachers could be absent to care for a sick family member.
Riege said, "there are some people who probably did not ratify the contract because there's no raise in salary this year, because they felt sick leave and family sick leave were inadequate, because they were not happy with insurance costs … there are six or seven different things that caused people to not ratify it."
Julie Jensen, director of human resources, says she is disappointed the contract was not approved. "Both sides have invested a lot of time and effort into this and when the teams come to an agreement and aare unable to follow through on it, it is disappointing," she says.
"I hope we can get a contract ratified. I hope a settlement is on the horizon. I think we have the same goal in mind and that's to agree on a contract," Jensen says. "I hoped we could have been celebrating today, but that was not the case."
Superintendent Corrine Johnson also was disappointed and "surprised. The history of the district is that when the (AEA) brings the teachers a tentative agreement, it gets ratified."
"What we want to know is why it failed," Johnson says. "We don't know it was the whole package or just certain parts of the package."
The next step is to go back to the drawing board. "We are going back to negotiations between the district negotiating team and the teachers' negotiating team without mediators and we'll renegotiate things we feel are problem areas and see if we can get a new tentative contract before the school year ends," Riege says.
"We'd like to thank the teachers for taking such a close and concerned look at the contract," says Riege. "Our hopes were that it would pass, but the teachers decided not to ratify it and we're trying to get it fixed so maybe we'll get one that will be passed."
Call Amanda L. Rohde at 434-2214 or e-mail her at amanda.rohde@austindailyherald.com.