Lindbergh National Education Association President Kim Scronce told the Board of Education last week that teachers will work to contract until they see “significant progress” on a series of demands the union has made.

One of the demands made by the Lindbergh National Education Association, or LNEA, is the immediate formation of a salary schedule committee that would include teachers, administrators and community members.

“We expect this committee to be organized and have met by the September board meeting, with further dates identified for regularly scheduled meetings. Teachers are ready to begin now,” Scronce told the board July 12.

Regarding the existing salary schedule, she said, “We acknowledge what we currently have in place is not working. However, we deny the statements that blame LNEA for the situation. The problems with the schedule have occurred over many years, and much of the problem has been the fact that the district is not committing enough money to fund the schedule. Regardless of how we got here, we must work together to fix this …”

The LNEA also wants the creation of a long-term, three- to five-year strategic plan with annual goals that will eventually make Lindbergh teachers’ pay in the top half of benchmark districts as identified in Superintendent Jim Simpson’s contract.

“This plan needs to be complete in time for the planning of the 2017-’18 budget,” Scronce said. “We want to see the district make budgeting for teachers’ salaries a priority.”

Among other demands made by the LNEA are creating and adopting of a policy regarding district reserves, providing teachers with contracts with salary amounts before the May 15 deadline and polling the community about a possible tax-rate increase.

“We can’t make the important decisions we have to make as a district without knowing where our community stands,” said Scronce, a fifth-grade teacher at Long Elementary School. “The goals and expectations I have outlined can be accomplished with all stakeholders working together. However, until significant progress is made towards meeting these goals, Lindbergh teachers will be withholding voluntary services, or working to contract. In the last week, 80 percent of Lindbergh teachers responded to a survey asking if they would be willing to take such action. Ninety-four percent of teachers are willing to do so …”

Scronce was one of 12 speakers at last week’s board meeting. Board President Kathy Kienstra did not place time limits on speakers, who addressed the board for about one hour. One resident whose daughter is a Lindbergh teacher, Ann Zytniak, spoke for roughly 15 minutes.

The school board recently voted unanimously to approve a salary schedule that provides an average raise of 1.25 percent for teachers for the 2016-2017 school year.

Teachers will not advance a step on the salary schedule for having another year of experience. To provide for step increases, an average 3-percent pay raise is needed to fund the pay schedule.

Under the salary schedule, teacher pay for the coming school year ranges from $39,234 to $87,834. Potential stipends available to teachers include an additional $2,500 per year for earning National Board Certification and an additional $3,000 per year for earning a doctorate degree.

For a starting teacher who is paid $39,234, the total compensation — insurance, retirement contribution and Medicare tax — is $54,864.14. For a teacher at the top of the pay schedule who earns $87,834 — without potential stipends — the total compensation is $111,215.84.

Since the June 14 board meeting, Kienstra said she has spoken with Scronce and LNEA Vice President Gretchen Moser.

“… That conversation was the first step in what I hope will be a process of continued communication among the administration, the board and the LNEA, including the teachers,” she said. “Tonight, I am proposing that the Board of Education schedule a workshop in the near future where we can openly further discuss these issues that have been brought forth to us … Our intent is it (the workshop) to be quite soon.”

When asked by the Call if the teachers’ decision to work to contract will help students, Simpson said, “It doesn’t, and as a matter of fact, every bit of working to contract is about denial of volunteer services. Working to contract and denial of volunteer activity are synonyms. Within the contract, they have to perform their job because they’re getting paid by that and failure to do so is serious. Outside contract hours is what we’re talking about. Anything that was given to students, any kind of attention, services or help given to students outside their contract hours, they’re going to refuse to do.

“And that’s their right because the district never mandated anybody volunteer for anything … We know we’ll still have a good school year because the contract day is pretty much what teachers do anyway. When you think about how many teachers volunteer outside the contract day, many do, but many don’t. Many come to work and go home at the end of the day like normal people.”

As for the LNEA’s demand to establish a salary schedule committee, he said, “…We actually are for that because the salary schedule is really a product of many years of the NEA moving money from cell to cell, almost always moving it to the veterans’ side of the scale and shorting the beginning side of the scale and the middle — and that’s how you get some veterans getting 21-percent raises and you can get new teachers getting hardly anything. And we’d like to correct that. We really would like to correct that. So we’ve always said we’re ready to do a salary schedule committee, and have been saying that for a long time.”

But Simpson said the LNEA leadership “doesn’t want to move dollars around at this point because there’s no more new dollars to play with, so they would be taking money from (some) teachers and moving it to other teachers. Now that that’s wide open and visible — and in the past that’s been done and nothing’s really been said too much publicly about it — but now all teachers’ eyes are on that: Am I going to become a winner or a loser in this deal?”

The superintendent said, “… A salary schedule committee was basically given to them by the board in June … As a token of our appreciation to you, the board voted at the June meeting to say, ‘NEA, you can move the money within the salary schedule as you see fit,’ and they refused. A salary committee can do nothing but that, move money. There’s no new money to add to the mix.”