The foundation for what Anderson Community Schools leaders and local teachers union officials are calling an “historic” collective bargaining agreement was laid two years ago.
The new contract, approved by members of the Anderson Federation of Teachers on Sept. 18 and formally ratified Tuesday during a special meeting of the ACS Board of Trustees, sets forth a new salary matrix that aims to measure teachers’ experience — and thus guide regular pay raises — in a more equitable manner, according to district officials. It also gives nearly every teacher in the district a base salary increase of at least $4,000.
“We realized about this time last year that we were going to have to significantly increase our starting wage and our teacher wage in order to compete with surrounding districts,” ACS Superintendent Joe Cronk said. “Our new salary matrix will allow us to go after teachers, to attract talent, to be able to match salaries in other districts when we need to.”
Unlike the contentious collective bargaining cycle two years ago — in which the district was forced to cancel at least one day of classes due to 15% of its teachers calling in sick — this year’s negotiations were aided by commitments from both sides to focus on goals they had in common.
Cronk said administrative leaders and AFT officials began informally discussing the parameters of a new contract in February and independently agreed to bring in the same mediator, Michele Moore, who was appointed by the Indiana Education Employment Relations Board two years ago.
“She was a known entity, and she came with some ideas,” ACS attorney Charles Rubright said. “She established relationships with both sides. She was able to speak frankly to both sides, and it was maybe better that she as a mediator speak frankly to both sides, because she was accepted and had credibility.”
One of the key points Moore made in early pre-bargaining sessions, officials said, was pointing out that both sides were constrained by policies enacted in the Indiana General Assembly. Legislation passed in 2015, Cronk explained, made changes to the collective bargaining process as well as methods used to calculate educator experience. An indirect result, AFT leaders have maintained, has been stagnant wages that have contributed to teacher shortages both locally and statewide.
The end result, Cronk said, was consensus on a new contract reached earlier in the calendar year than he can recall in his more than 30 years with ACS. The contract was approved by AFT membership three days after formal statewide collective bargaining began.
“I think this will go a long way to start correcting the issues created over the past several years,” said Randy Harrison, president of the Anderson Federation of Teachers Local 519. “This (contract) goes a long way toward saying, we want good people working with our students at Anderson Community Schools.”
The contract hikes first-year teacher salaries from $44,000 to $48,000 and also provides a mechanism to more equitably compensate educators who earn masters degrees while employed at ACS.
Acknowledging the difficult hiring environment that ACS and other districts are currently operating in, the contract also designates 13 “hard-to-fill/retain” positions which are eligible for $1,000 quarterly stipends of the course of the two-year agreement. Non-certified employees will also receive a 6% salary increase for the 2023-24 school year, and a 3% increase in 2024-25.
“Everyone wants to be compensated fairly,” ACS Board President Pat Hill said. “This contract puts us back in the hunt, where before, being a little bit behind other corporations of our size and nature, we were the ones seeing our teachers leaving. Now we’re in a situation where we can go and get them. We’re in that competitive hunt.”
This article appeared in The Herald Bulletin.