It's official: The Austin Education Association has a contract.

Members of the Austin School Board unanimously approved the contract for the 2001-03 school year at Monday night's meeting.

The new contract will give the AEA members a 1 percent pay increase for the first year and a 3 percent increase in the second year of the contract.

Also in the new contract, the district agreed to pay the full health insurance contribution for single and family coverage during the first year, and in the second year, let the teachers choose a monthly contribution of varying amounts.

The contract eliminated serious family leave, but increased sick leave to 16 days a year, including up to nine days for the care of a spouse, parent or adult child and as many as five days for a more extensive list of family members.

The number of days teachers must work was increased from 190 days to 194 in the new contract.

The School Board also discussed the upcoming technology projects within the district that are scheduled for this summer.

These projects include replacing the wide area network infrastructure which, according to Dan Noss of the technology services department, is the communication network between the school buildings and between the district and SMIG, the district's Internet provider.

Noss said "the system is overloaded," and the projects this summer "will make a big difference … in the slowness problems we've been having."

Noss says the file servers at Banfield, Neveln, Southgate and Sumner Elementaries; Woodson Community School and the Boy's Ranch School will all be replaced this summer and additional personal computers will be installed at Austin High School. Noss says the class sizes at the high school are expected to increase and because of that, "it is important for all computer labs to be brought up to 32 computers from the current 26."

The labs with older, outdated computers will be completely replaced. Other improvements will include upgrading the memory of the Neveln and Sumner portable computer labs and rebuilding the Macintosh lab at Banfield.

Amanda L. Rohde can be reached at 434-2214 or by e-mail at :mailto:amanda.rohde@austindailyherald.com