Letter: High School Teachers Should Blame Washington Twp. For Contract Issues

Dear Editor,

The West Morris Regional High School District (“WMRHSD”, or “District”) recently announced that “Back to School Night” has been “postponed” to a date not yet determined. Apparently, the West Morris Regional Education (“WMREA”), which is the union representing the teachers, decided to force a indefinite postponement of Back to School Night at WM Mendham and WM Central High Schools by refusing to attend the event, traditionally held in the evening to enable parents to attend. This represents a continuation of certain “job actions” that the WMREA has asked the teachers to perform going back to the last school year, including delaying the writing of college recommendations for seniors, picketing before the school day in front of the high schools and placing lawn signs around our towns asking for more pay for the teachers. Now, in their recent letter to the Patch, we see the WMREA suggests that it is being subjected to intimidation. I fear the union representatives “doth protest too much.”

My Usual Disclaimer

I am Mendham Borough’s representative to the WMRHSD Board of Education (“BOE”), but I am writing this as a parent, resident and taxpayer, not as a board member. So, to be clear, my comments herein are not intended to represent the BOE, and any analysis presented herein is mine, not the BOE’s. In fact, my personal views on the most important issues that face our District rarely coincide with those of a majority of the BOE. (Also, please excuse any inadvertent typos that might be included herein.)

The Executive Summary

If you want it short and sweet, and don’t have time to fully learn about what’s going on by reading this entire letter, then here are the “crib notes.”

1. The average rate of annual pay increase for our teachers over the past 15 years has been materially higher than that of any relevant public education or private sector benchmarks in New Jersey or across the US.

2. The average rate of annual pay increase contained in the contract offer proposed by the BOE for the 3-year contract period of 2013-2016 is equal to or higher than that for any of these same benchmarks over the same period.

3. The BOE’s proposed salary guide starts by bring all teachers to the average salary of comparable teachers in the 15 most comparable school districts the BOE could find. In the 18 months since the BOE made its proposal public, the WMREA has never taken issue with the appropriateness of the list of comparable school districts or the methodology the BOE employed for determining average compensation at these districts. The BOE’s then went further to make its proposed salary guide more favorable than the average of the comparable school districts by adjusting any teachers that would have been better off “stepping up” in the existing salary guide only gradually to the new salary guide over the 3-year contract period. The grossly underpaid teachers at the bottom of our guide would see tremendous increases in compensation, to bring them to “market levels.” The grossly overpaid teachers at the top of our guide would not have their compensation cut to “market levels,” but rather only frozen. Thus, NO teacher would see a cut in pay.

4. The BOE’s proposed contract does not even touch other payments, such as for “longevity,” which many other recent contracts in other school districts have adjusted down or eliminated.

5. Even if the teachers want to continue to ignore the objective facts and analysis that demonstrate clearly that the BOE has already offered a very attractive contract to the teachers, they should complain to the community of Washington Township, not the communities of the Mendhams and Chesters that Mendham HS serves, because The Mendhams and Chesters send $8 million to the District that should go to Mendham HS that goes to Central HS instead. The Mendhams and Chesters contribute about twice as much as Washington Township to the compensation of teachers in the District, on both a “total dollar” and “dollars per pupil” basis. If the teachers want to take their misplaced frustrations out on any community, it should not be the Mendhams and Chesters, who already contribute 40% more to high school education than they get in “high school education” in return. They should take their frustrations out on Washington Township, because that is the community that forces the District to divert money that rightfully should go to Mendham HS, and its teachers. Until Washington Township elects representatives that will vote to equalize per pupil spending and allow a public referendum to change the unfair taxation formula to be conducted, and until Washington Township votes to change the taxing formula such that they pay their fair share going forward, our teachers should go picket at Central HS. Please, teachers of Mendham HS, don’t take actions, such as refusing to participate in “Back to School Night,” that are adverse to the interests of the students and parents of Mendham HS, because the communities from which these people hail are those already sacrificing greatly to fund Mendham HS and its teachers.

6. Stop now if this is all you need to know. Read further if you want more details. Then, if you have not already done so, please read the WMREA letter to the Patch. Note that nothing in that letter contradicts anything factual contained in my letter. The WMREA only disagrees on the interpretation of those facts. They feel they are being treated unfairly and that they are being intimidated. I feel they have been given a year more than they should have needed to make an educated decision to accept a generous and fair contract. You can decide for yourself who you believe. I just hope the “rank and file” teachers focus on the facts, realize that they have been offered a generous contract, ask the WMREA to accept the BOE’s contract proposal and get back to focusing what I know at least most of them really want to focus on – working with parents to educate our children and assist in their formation.

Why Keep Fighting a Very Generous Contract Proposal?

Even though I have my suspicions about why the WMREA leadership continues to pursue an “unwinnable fight” here, I am puzzled by the continued willingness of the majority of teachers, particularly at Mendham HS, to go along with their union reps’ requests for further and more severe job actions. The BOE proposed and made public in April 2014 a 3-year contract proposal for the July 2013 to June 2016 contract period. The WMREA rejected it. Eventually, the WMREA submitted a counter-proposal and the BOE rejected that. When an independent fact finder asked both sides to “split the baby” in order to put this years long negotiation behind us and move forward, the BOE agreed to do so IF the WMREA agreed to do so immediately. The AMREA rejected the fact finders proposed settlement. By the way, that fact finder settlement was far closer to the BOE’s proposal than to the WMREA’s proposal, indicating the independent fact finder’s belief that the BOE proposal was more reasonable than the WMREA’s proposal. So, the WMREA now wants the public to come in and help it convince the BOE to pay more of the District’s dwindling resources to its membership than the BOE proposed to do 18 months ago, after it determined, through extensive market analysis, what would be fair for, and generous to, our teachers. Before getting into what might be motivating the union representatives to continue fighting, one needs to understand more about “salary guides,” the “meat” in any teachers’ contract.

Salary Guides: More Than You Ever Wanted to Know

The salary guide is the schedule of annual salaries paid to teachers in the District, as negotiated by the union, on behalf the District’s “employees” (the teachers), and the BOE, on behalf of the District’s “customers” (students and taxpayers). The salary guide itself only deals with salaries, and not with other forms of compensation for teachers, such as “longevity payments,” healthcare insurance, extra-curricular compensation (e.g., coaching) or compensation for other activities outside the scope of there contractually agreed responsibilities (teachers sometimes perform such outside activities for little or no additional compensation). Teachers get paid more on this salary guide as they accumulate more years of service in the District (a proxy for experience) and by attaining higher levels of personal academic accreditation (BA, MA, etc, a proxy for knowledge). Simply put, the highest paid teachers are those that have been in the District the longest and have gone to school the most. The salary guide makes no distinctions for the quality of teaching (which is likely a more subjective thing to assess) or the subject matter being taught (lower level classes vs higher level classes, math versus history, etc.).

All salary guides in the state of New Jersey have similar structures, but each District negotiates its own set of dollar values at each “step” in the guide. Each District is permitted to have only one guide, to the best of my knowledge, for all of their teachers – it’s a single collectively bargained contract. These guides typically have between 15 and 25 steps and all teachers typically “increase a step” each year they are in the District. Once a teacher reaches the top step in the guide, all remaining years of that teacher’s service in the District are paid at that “top step.” When negotiating new guides, the state of NJ precludes creating a guide in which any individual teacher makes less than in the previous year (when they were at the previous step). Each step has slightly varying salary levels, depending upon that personal educational attainment variable.

The WMRHSD Salary Guide and Related Compensation Issues

Salaries at the top step of the WMRHSD salary guide are more than twice as high as those at the lowest step, even thought there is no difference in the duties or hours performed by teachers at each of those steps. They teach similar classes, teach similar class sizes, work similar hours, perform similar duties – the collectively bargained contract insists upon much of this. The analysis of comparable school districts that the BOE performed and publicly presented concluded that the WMRHSD guide underpaid entry level teachers by about $10,000/year and overpaid our most experienced teachers by about $10,000/year, relative to the mean compensation paid by comparable school districts at comparable steps in their respective salary guides. My personal perspective is that this skew in our salary guide developed over several negotiation cycles (typically about 3-4 year cycles) over the past 15 years because past BOE’s focused on negotiating an overall percentage increase in the guide and allowed the union representatives to distribute that increase as it saw fit over the various steps in the guide. Union representatives are typically, if not always, very experienced teachers who are typically paid at, or very near, the “top of the guide.” In developing its proposed salary guide in early 2014, the BOE sought to bring our salary guide back into line with the “market” over the 3-year contract period. It started by bringing all younger teachers up to “market” compensation levels right away, it basically froze compensation at the “top of the guide” in order to allow the natural salary inflation in the market to “catch up” to our unusually high existing compensation levels. We did NOT cut compensation for any teacher, including those most overpaid relative to market – we just did not permit that overpayment to get worse than it already is. Finally, for teachers “in the middle of the guide,” we eased the transition to the new, market-based guide, by gradually “weaning them off of” our existing guide to the new guide over the three year contract period. Thus upshot is that while by the 3rd year of the contract period, our teachers would all be “at market,” we would continue paying above market for our teachers, as a group, for the first two years of the contract period.

One more thing is always worth noting in the state of NJ when it comes to compensation in the public sector. The annual retirement benefit for most public employees is determined largely by their average salary during the final 3 years of their service, providing a very strong motivation for those considering retiring in the near future to “pad their pensions.” Note that the 3-year contract period under discussion ENDS (not begins) only 9 months from now, so those teachers considering retirement in the next year or so – teachers likely already at the “top step” of the salary guide -- would have very strong motivation to avoid agreeing to a contract that effectively freezes “top step” salaries for the past 3 years.

How Should The WMREA Leadership View the BOE Proposal?

I would expect that the WMREA leadership have a fiduciary duty to negotiate the best contract for ALL of the WMREA members (the teachers), when evaluated as a group. I believe, for reasons outlined below, that the BOE proposal is both fair to all teachers and generous to certain subsets of those teachers. For this reason, I would expect the WMREA leadership to favor, and accept, the BOE’s proposal. However, it is also likely that the leadership of the WMREA, which negotiates the contract for the teachers, is comprised almost entirely of “seasoned” teachers who tend to find themselves at the “top of the salary guide” and who have become accustomed over the past 15 years to seeing those at the “top of the salary guide” do best in the periodic contract negotiations. Moreover, it is also possible that some of these same people may also be considering retiring (we’ve seen quite a number of teacher retirements over the past couple of years), creating a great deal more personal financial incentive to maximize annual salary levels over the 2013-2016 time period (the contract period in question). These factors might make such individuals personally unenthusiastic about a contract proposal that does not further increase the existing “above market” salary levels at the “top steps” in our salary guide. Thus, I can understand why individual teachers, who I suspect may be disproportionately over-represented in the WMREA leadership, may not personally favor the BOE’s proposal. It’s also possible that, in any decision, it is very hard to separate out one’s personal feelings, particularly if you have become accustomed over the years to things being done a certain, a way that is now forced to change for the common good. However, the conclusion that the BOE contract proposal is fair and generous to a majority of the teachers remains well supported by the facts, facts which the WMREA leadership has never taken issue with over the 18 months since the proposal was originally made and explained publicly in April 2014, despite several invitations to present any relevant data. Thus, I hope that the WMREA leadership is able to focus on the collective interests of our teachers as a whole. It is also possible that the WMREA leadership is having difficultly in evaluating properly the data presented publicly by the BOE and by me. However, if this were the case, since we have many very capable teachers in the WMREA, I would have hoped that they would have recruited an individual they trust to help them analyze the data appropriately.

How Should The WMREA “Rank and File” View the BOE Proposal?

Those at the bottom of the salary guide do incredibly better than the District has paid (underpaid) them in the past and the BOE’s analysis concluded that over 70% of ALL WMRHSD teachers would earn more money over the contract period with the proposed salary guide than by simply advancing through our existing salary guide (which already raises the average teacher’s compensation by about 2.3% a year on average). Again, NO TEACHER’S PAY IS DECLINING in the proposed contract.

Our teachers are well paid, and always have been. When the teachers were still fighting this last Spring, a year after the BOE submitted its proposal, I couldn’t understand why. I figured that maybe I was missing something, so I did some research and analyzed compensation growth amongst our teachers versus all other relevant market indices I could find, in both the public education and private sectors. By focusing on the growth of compensation, instead of the absolute level of compensation, I sought to remove from the equation the subjective question “who’s worth more?,” which always creates ideological battles. I analyzed both the long term (15 years or 4 contract cycles) and the most recent 3-year contract period under consideration, assuming the BOE’s proposed salary guide was implemented. What I found, as you can see from the following table, is that our teachers have experienced equal to considerably faster compensation growth over BOTH of these periods than any relevant index I could find. The WMREA leadership saw this analysis months ago and I invited that leadership to present any similar, relevant data that I might have missed. I have not seen or heard of any such data from the leadership since. I suspect that means that it doesn’t exist, that my analysis accurately portrays just how well our communities and District have treated our teachers. Again, to highlight the point, this analysis is of the overall salary guide – I suspect it would show much higher growth in compensation over the past 15 years if it showed just the “top of our guide.” Therefore, I concluded that “the teacher doth complain too much.”

(See the graph associated with these points as an image above. Click on the image to expand.)

A couple other points are worth making:

1. As noted above, the independent “fact finder” proposed a settlement offer that was much closer to what the board had proposed than what the WRMEA is requesting, indicating that he felt the BOE’s position in this negotiation was more reasonable than that of the teachers’ union. While the BOE did indicate that, if the WRMEA agreed immediately to the fact finders recommendation on how to “split the baby” back in June, it would also support his recommendation, the WRMEA rejected that one-time, even more generous overture by the BOE. I believe that the BOE’s original proposal is more than fair, is fiscally responsible and that the BOE should not wander from it again.
2. Even thought the District has overpaid the teachers over the past 15 years, as evidenced by the analysis that both the BOE and I have performed, that doesn’t mean it should, or can afford to, keep doing so forever. In fact, the District is far more fiscally constrained, after years of high structural costs (including rapidly rising healthcare costs for teachers) and only gradually-rising revenues – due to the statewide “2% cap” on District-wide tax increases, than it used to be. For the teachers and members of the public that attend board meetings or review the annual school budgets, they know that the District has already been forced to cut District-wide spending on regular education, athletics and co-curricular activities by 1.5% (down even more at Mendham HS) this school year (relative to last year), even though our District-wide taxes went up by 2% (and up even more in the Mendhams and Chesters) this school year (relative to last year). This financial hole is only getting deeper because of structurally higher cost increases (District employee healthcare costs, including for the teachers, and special education costs) exceed maximum permissible tax increases (the “2% District-wide cap”). The District’s costs are growing 2-3x faster than its tax revenues, so cuts in other areas are the only way to balance the budget. These trends are not expected to abate anytime soon – in fact, it will get worse in 2 years, when the annual employee healthcare cost increases will once again fall entirely on the District. Because the District is so resource-constrained, paying teachers more would require cutting more teachers, which would likely negatively impact educational quality. By waiting to sign this contract, the teachers take the risk that the District’s finances get even worse (which seems inevitable), which may force the District to retract its current proposal for fear of no longer being able to pay for it.

“Don’t Bite The Hand That Feeds …”

I am even more perplexed by the apparent “tone deafness” of those teachers participating in job actions at Mendham HS. I can see picketing in Washington Township if you don’t like the fact that the District is so financially constrained, but why in Mendham? Do the teachers not know that the Mendham and Chesters, which Mendham HS serves, send enough in taxes to the high school district every year to massively increase funding for Mendham HS, including for teacher compensation, and still return money to its taxpayers? Why take any action that might negatively impact the students and parents of these already overly supportive communities? If the teachers insist on protesting their situation, protest to the Washington Township community that siphons off $8 million a year for their Central HS from the resources that should go to Mendham HS, just so it doesn’t have to pay its fair share in taxes. Washington Township has the power to vote onto the BOE people that will address this problem but they have consistently neglected to do so over the past 2 to 3 decades. So, teachers, go picket at Central HS if you want to communicate with the people NOT DOING ENOUGH FOR YOU. For every dollar the Mendhams and Chesters contribute to our teachers in this District, Washington Township contributes about 50 cents. The Central HS teachers should tell the Washington Township community that they should start paying more, and the Mendham HS teaches should go join them! But, to the people of the Mendhams and Chesters who so generously support our high school and its teachers, the Mendham HS teachers should say nothing more than, “Thank you.” If the teachers are upset they are getting paid ½% to 1% less than they feel they deserve, imagine how we in the Mendhams and Chesters feel about getting 40% less education than we pay for EVERY YEAR.

Let’s Be Rational, Please, And Move Forward

So, I support our teachers right to express, in a cordial and well-informed manner, their perspective on the compensation they receive. However, I do wish that, as a group, they would better inform themselves. If they did, they would see how attractive the BOE’s proposal really is. I also wish they would express more gratefulness to the good people of the Mendhams and Chesters, who collectively spend so much to keep this District going, so much more than they get in return for that money, because so much of that money is diverted to Central HS. I can’t understand how postponing “Back to School Night” is going to help the teachers, and it certainly won’t help our students or their parents, for many of whom this is likely the most important exposure to the academic side of our high school all year long.

The teachers’ representatives, and some teachers, have approached this 18-month contract negotiation (since the BOE submitted its proposal) with emotion, not information. You see it again in their recent letter to the Patch. No facts, all innuendo and emotion. This approach has done a great disservice to the teachers waiting for a contract, to our supportive communities and to our District, which has had to divert precious time and resources to an unnecessarily drawn out negotiating process. If our teachers and their representatives were better informed, they would understand that they were offered a very attractive contract proposal 18 months ago by a District that can just barely afford to pay for it. They would understand that our communities, and even the BOE, have bent over backwards to provide them with the best offer possible within our currently-flawed District structure that allows the siphoning off of $8 million a year from Mendham HS. So, teachers, if you still want to complain, head west and do so vocally! Just don’t take it out on us, the ones already bearing way more than our fair share of the burden and trying desperately hard to do the right thing for you.

We have some wonderful teachers at Mendham HS. Our family has been, and remains, very grateful for these teachers over the years. I also understand that “teacher pay,” including at Mendham HS, does not make anyone rich. By the same token, teaching at Mendham HS is a privilege and it offers considerable non-monetary benefits. There is a very strong community-wide commitment to education, which provides “tailwind” to our teachers’ efforts. While our student body is not without its own challenges, I expect that most teachers would tell you that our student body presents far fewer challenges than that of virtually any other high school district in the state. This is a very nice, safe, inspiring place to teach. I hope our beloved teachers are keeping that in mind. I hope that the teachers will employ less emotion, more factual discernment and, perhaps, a little more gratitude, as they consider how to behave and what to focus upon going forward. This is the example we hope they set for our children, as we entrust them with the education and formation of our children. By any objective analysis, the BOE-proposed contract should be viewed as attractive by a majority of the teachers. Even if it weren’t, the District can’t afford to do more, so the teachers should stop trying to make something happen that will only place more pressure on our financially strapped District.

Until the diversion of the money that the Mendhams and Chesters send the high school District each year stops, Mendham HS teachers are likely to find that the District’s increasingly severe resource constraints will start to impact the District’s ability to pay them fairly. Fortunately, the District can still afford, just barely, to pay the teachers fairly this contract cycle. It will get worse, though, not better, as time goes on. Until more people step up to change it, the District remains in this unfortunate state, so let’s hope the teachers accept reality, accept the contract offer and get back to doing what teachers love to do – supporting and developing their students in every way possible. I, for one, would view a quick rescheduling of “Back to School Night” and an enthusiastic return to writing college recommendations as a step in the right direction.

Sincerely,

Brian Cavanaugh
Mendham Borough