ROCKLAND, Maine — After working for more than three years under an expired contract, nearly 140 unionized employees of the Rockland-area school district have a new agreement and pay raises. That new contract, however, only covers the period from July 1, 2012, when the old contract expired, through June 30, 2015, and the employees already are seeking to negotiate a new agreement for this school year.
On Jan. 21, the Regional School Unit 13 Board approved the new contract with the district’s support staff which covers educational technicians, food service workers, custodians, bus drivers and administrative assistants. The employees had ratified the agreement on Jan. 9.
RSU 13 Superintendent John McDonald said it was difficult to say why the contract took so long to approve but explained that this new contract groups together four previously separate contracts with the various types of employees. In addition, the new contract coordinates terms that had been different in the former School Administrative Districts 5 and 50 pacts.
RSU 13 was created in 2009 when the two SADs merged.
In December 2014, support staff workers and their supporters turned out to a school board meeting to protest the lack of a contract and having to work under the terms of the old one, without any pay raises or step increases.
The pay raises included in the recently approved labor agreement are retroactive to 2013. The cost of the increases total about $225,000, which were accounted for in the school district budgets, Business Manager Peter Orne said.
Hal Perry, the chief negotiator for the support staff, said the accumulated retroactive pay should be paid out to employees in February.
“This has been a long time coming. Everybody is happy that it has been settled,” he said.
Perry said negotiations will begin soon on a contract for the current school year.
The teachers in the district have a contract that runs through June, while one covering administrators expired last year.
Under the old support staff contract, the starting pay for educational technicians had been $10.66 per hour for someone with no experience. Under the new contract, the starting pay for an educational technician with no experience increased to a range of $11.08 to $12.16 per hour for 2014-2015, depending on whether they were classified as ed tech level one, two or three. The higher the classification, the more that worker can do.
The top of the pay scale for the educational technicians hits $16.37 per hour in 2014-2015 for someone with 20 or more years of experience.
The pay for bus drivers in 2014-2015 was increased to a range of $14.82 per hour for someone with no experience to $19.62 for someone with at least 17 years of experience.
Custodians saw their pay scale in 2014-2015 increase to $12.41 per hour for someone with no experience to $16.61 for a worker with 15 or more years of experience.
Food service workers have a pay scale for 2014-2015 with a range of $10.95 to $14.10 per hour. The scale for administrative assistants is now $13.18 per hour to start and reaches $17.57 per hour once they have worked 20 years.
The district pays 100 percent of the health insurance premiums for full-time workers and will pay a portion of dependent coverage.