Within weeks, contract negotiations will begin between the school board and the faculty at Oak Park and River Forest High School. This is a critical moment for this school and our communities.
We are nearing the end of a five-year teacher contract that gave far too much and asked far too little of the faculty at OPRF. The responsibility for that contract is with a long-gone school board, one that already feels as if it belongs to an entirely different era of educational practices and compensation giveaways.
The raises and benefits in that contract were far too rich, and only felt more outlandish as this numbing recession took hold and hasn’t yet quit. The contract also reflected none of the healthy and overdue education conversations about linking performance to compensation, about innovating with longer school days, schools within schools, new methods of teacher evaluation, and an easing of tenure to list just a few issues.
We report this week that the school board will soon begin talking about how it will be represented at upcoming negotiations with the faculty union, known somewhat regally as the Faculty Senate. A shift from five years back when a single board member sat at the table — then school board member, now River Forest Village President John Rigas — to a larger representation of board members is important.
Much more important though would have been for this school board to begin talking publicly months back about its broad approach to these negotiations. We’re not suggesting that the next contract be negotiated in public. We are suggesting that before retreating behind closed doors, it would be helpful for the board to have sent the faculty and the public some critical signals. District 97 has been doing just that for a year, and we think it has been a healthy reality check.
Here are the points we’d like to hear from the District 200 school board:
- Yes, we all know the district has $90 million in the vault. No, we won’t be taken to the cleaners over it. A pay freeze to start and then increases in the 1.5 to 2 percent range seem reasonable.
- It is essential and non-negotiable that there will be an innovative and substantive merit component to the new pay structure. Let’s be creative and build something outstanding that we can all be proud of. Let’s tie it, finally, to making real, measurable progress on closing the academic gap among our minority students.
- Merit pay should essentially replace the absurd automatic step increases that exist nowhere outside of public employment.
- Get ready to pay, over the course of this contract and the next, a substantially larger share of your health care. It’s long past time to get real on benefit costs.
- We’re getting off the “comparable school” merry-go-round that just drives up wages in an artificially closed circle.
- The economy is changing; education is changing. Let’s hold this contract to a maximum of three years. That gives everyone stability but doesn’t lock any of us into a model that can’t be sustained.
- And remember, we were promised that the $90 million would last us until 2018.
We’ve got any number of the current board members on the record from endorsement interviews pledging upside down and backwards that they understood the need to be tough in these contract negotiations. We want tough and we want innovative. Outside of hiring a superintendent, negotiating a contract with teachers is the most important task of a school board.
There are positive things that have unfolded at OPRF over the past four years. A largely new, substantially improved team of administrators is in place. A raft of new academic division chairs are in place and ready to create change.
Now it is time for the school board to serve its broad constituency: totally overstretched taxpayers, students who deserve those things that are best even if that doesn’t mean colleging in the Ivy League, and teachers who deserve fair compensation and opportunity in changed circumstances.