Saddle River Teachers' Union Casts 'No Confidence' Vote For BOE

Editor's note: The following is a letter to the editor submitted by the co-presidents of the Saddle River Education Association regarding their ongoing labor dispute with the Saddle River Board of Education.

The Saddle River Education Association (SREA) remains committed to our students and school community. The students are our number one priority, and they always will be. Unfortunately, our labor dispute with the Saddle River Board of Education remains unresolved despite our best efforts.

In fact, the SREA has taken a vote of no confidence in both the Board of Education and the superintendent. They have fired every single aide in the district, reduced music to two days a week, eliminated the Instrumental Music Program outright, cut Physical Education for the second time to three days a week, which reduces the number of classes each grade level receives, and reduced World Language to three days a week.

We are devastated by the impact this is having on our students’ education and the livelihoods of our aides, of which one is a cancer patient and needs her benefits to continue chemotherapy. And they are all the sole recipients of health benefits for their families. And of course, all of this, while our members continue to work under an expired contract with no increases in salary while contributions to health benefits climb ever higher.

The SREA has made itself fully available through this first phase of fact-finding to reach a settlement at the table that is fair to all the stakeholders. It has come to our attention that the Board of Education recently sent out a letter to the parents informing them of the status of negotiations. There are so many misrepresentations, that we could not remain silent. Please allow us to present the facts.

In the letter, the board stated that they offered us both a compensation package and health benefits relief commensurate with those of our colleagues in neighboring towns. That is not the case at all. At one point, they said they offered us county average for our salary package, when in fact, it was considerably lower. The county average is comprised of all the settlement percentages and then averaged, in this case it is 3.01 percent. This number represents the amount of money added to the total amount of salaries, which is then divided amongst the employees. Individual raises are not increased by this percent. The board of education’s last offer was 2.6 percent. The association’s proposals have always been fair and reasonable, considering the resources of the community.

Additionally, they said they offered us a similar contract to what other towns were getting for health benefit contribution relief from a law enacted in 2011, called Chapter 78, that had unintended consequences for public sector employees, requiring contributions that were beyond an employee’s expectations. In almost all the cases, employees currently today bring home less pay than they did in 2009, and in many cases teachers have had to find second and third jobs to make ends meet. The board of education said that the offers us relief when in fact they have not. Further, the board of education claims that teachers are paying on average 18 percent of their salaries towards their health benefits. This is not an accurate percentage as it considers several employees who are not paying for benefits as they receive them through a spouse or parent and therefore do not receive them through the district.

Lastly, the board of education claims that they are concerned about funding important programs that rely on the contributions that the teachers make towards their health benefits and that by issuing us any relief they would need to cut programming. As is well-known in our community, many of the programs mentioned by the district are already funded by the education foundation, and will remain so. Instead of trying to resolve these negotiations issues reasonably, the board of education is trying to pit us against our students, making false claims, and painting us as unreasonable and unrealistic, when in fact we do our research and have always considered our students and their families, as well as our community, above all else. It must be said, that we have no place in our community for these lies and divisiveness.

The association has no confidence in this board of education, and they should be held accountable by our community.

SREA members are making every effort to focus exclusively on the classroom and getting this dispute resolved. Please join us at the next board of education meeting, April 24 at 7:30 p.m., to show your support for the educators working hard to educate your children.

Thank you,

Bonnie Huston and Roberta Kleinbard

Co-Presidents, Saddle River Education Association

Email: daniel.hubbard@patch.com