Burlington teachers will go on strike Wednesday unless their contract battle with the city school board is resolved.
Teachers voted to strike Thursday afternoon. The move escalated the tension in a messy labor dispute and created uncertainty for parents of the city’s 3,700 public school students.
“Moments ago, my fellow members and I voted to authorize a strike beginning on September 13 if the board fails to come back to the table and stay there until we reach an agreement for a contract covering this school year,” said Fran Brock, Burlington Education Association president, in a press release issued late Thursday afternoon.
Brock, a Burlington High School history teacher, lashed out at the board for imposing contract terms last Friday and also accused the board of neglecting student needs.
“We are done standing by while a shrinking percentage of the district’s budgets goes to student instruction. And we are done standing by while this board prefers condescension over collaboration,” Brock said in her statement.
Board chair Mark Porter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Battle lines have been drawn over raises and health care, as well as direct instruction time.
The board disagrees with the union’s assessment of the situation. Members have said they are trying to increase instruction time to pull underperforming students up to grade level — with resistance from the union.
The board voted 9-1 to impose a contract for the 2017-2018 school year that offered an average $1,702 raise for teachers, representing a percentage increase of about 2.4 percent.
Burlington teachers earned an average of about $69,000 last year. Top pay was $84,750 and entry level pay was just more than $43,565.
Teachers rejected the imposed terms.
Over the course of some 17 contract meetings, the board developed a number of charts that suggested recent teacher raises and local school taxes have outpaced what taxpayers can afford.
This year’s strike vote echoes the discord that soured that start of the school year in 2016, when the board also imposed a contract and teachers took a strike vote. But at the last minute, the two sides were able to hash out a one-year agreement and there was no strike.
It’s unclear how things will play out this year.
Brock said teachers truly want a solution.
“We don’t want to strike; no one ever does,” she said. “What we want is for this school board to recognize our determination for a contract that works to keep the very best teachers so our city’s children can thrive.”
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If Philo has a point other than Stop Complaining, Pay The Teachers What They Want, And Get A Better Job Yourself, he has been unwilling or unable to make it despite 7 posts on this thread so far. I’ve repeatedly asked him to explain how the rest of us are all supposed to do what he instructs — get better paying jobs — so we can continue to feed the ever increasing demands of the teachers union, but he refuses to do so.
Now Lade comes to the rescue with vague platitudes. “Burlington needs something that will advance the economy” and “the answer is to build an economy that will support good schools.” How lovely! Problem solved! That is not an answer to the question of how we afford the greedy demands of the teachers union.
Knowyourassumptions has missed the point but that shouldn’t stop him from trying to make up what Philo is saying and then dispute it.
Philo has railed against the kind of development that the mall represents. I have always understood his point as being the mall development is not the kind of development Burlington needs. Burlington needs something that will advance the economy, not make one person richer. At least that’s what I’ve always taken away from what he says. It’s hard to write a political treatise in the comments section of the Seven Days as you are asking him to do.
As far as the teachers, the answer is not to limit their earning. The answer is to build an economy that can support good schools. I don’t have the space, time, or inclination to deliver my treatise on how but it certainly doesn’t focus on shut up and pay.
You’ve missed the point. That’s too bad.
No, I certainly did NOT miss your point. It’s as clear as a bell: tough luck if you don’t want to pay the ever increasing demands of the teachers union; get a better job. That’s the only solution you’ve offered.
You make the simpleminded suggestion that we “all” could/should make more money than we do in Vermont. How thoughtful. But you simply ignore why that historically hasn’t ever happened in VT and can’t happen. You’ve offered nothing except the wish that Vermonters could earn higher salaries.
There’s a very good reason that IT professionals earn more in Mass than they do here. Mass. doesn’t tell businesses, “You can’t build that here (factories, highways, housing). You ignore that reality completely. In fact, you’re a hypocrite: you have railed on these pages against development.
In the meantime, teacher salaries in VT are disproportionate to Vermonterers’ salaries and ability to pay, and you offer no solution except “shut up and pay.”
You’ve missed my point and you’ve assigned a quotation to me that appears nowhere in my words below.
Property taxes are basically based on income so the crippling impact of paying those teacher salaries are adjusted according to income.
I know people who work in IT, just as an example, that earn 60% of what they would make in a city like Boston. Cost of living in Chittenden county is very comparable to what it is in Boston. I know doctors and nurses that had to leave Vermont because their pay rate was much lower than elsewhere.
Teachers also make less here in Vermont than they do in many other places.
I am saying that there is no reason professions in Vermont can’t approach what the same professions pay in other places. Teachers are included in this.
You persist in your simpleminded response: “Instead of complaining about the teachers’ greed, just earn more money yourself.”
At this point, I can only assume that your let-them-eat-cake attitude about teacher greed is either ignorance of economic reality or deliberate indifference to the have nots in this debate.
Consider the alternative of Vermont’s School Choice Tuitioning governance. When parents can choose the school that best meets the needs of their individual children, public or independent, the labor debate disappears from the political lexicon and saves us all the aggravation of having our personal points of view attacked – not to mention the time and money everyone would save.
So you’ve identified the problems (sort of), knowyourassumptions. Now take an appropriate action that does not involve bringing others down because you can’t earn what you should be able to.
No, the only thing that’s absurd is the simpleminded suggestion that all of us non-teachers can just improve our salaries and benefits by asking, demanding, or taking a better job. Even if that were an appropriate answer to the greedy teachers union (and it’s not), it’s not possible because we’re trapped in a non-competitive economy. And the tragic irony is that the anti-business attitude that is partly responsible for making the Vermont economy so uncompetitive (for non public sector employees) is foisted on us by the same bleeding hearts in the Legislature who are owned and controlled by the VT NEA. “No” to business but “yes” to the unions. The deck is stacked in favor of the union and against the taxpayers.
“There is plenty of room for them to earn more.” That might be true if the federal government were paying their salaries. Apparently you don’t get the fact that it is the Vermont property taxpayers who are being forced to pay them. And those taxpayers are maxed out. So, no, there is no more “room” for them to earn more. Get it now?
Knowyourassumptions has used reductio ad absurdum to try to draw attention away from the fact that basically all professions in Vermont pay less than they do elsewhere while the cost of living in Vermont is just as high as those other places.
Vermont teacher salaries are around the middle in terms of what other states pay. There is plenty of room for them to earn more. The same is true of all professions in Vermont and of course the solution is much more involved than just asking for a raise.