HAMPDEN, Maine — The RSU 22 board unanimously endorsed a new three-year contract with the district’s teachers union Wednesday night, Superintendent Rick Lyons said shortly after the vote, which took place during a meeting at Hampden Academy.
The contract succeeds the previous agreement, which expired last summer, Lyons said.
After months of negotiations that at times were contentious, negotiating teams representing the district’s teachers and board members had a breakthrough on Friday, Lyons said.
The two teams, he said, “came back and resolved our differences and we [worked out] a tentative agreement,” he said.
Members of Education Association 22 began voting on ratifying the contract on Wednesday and are slated to wrap up Thursday morning, Hampden Academy teacher Emily Albee, who sits on the union’s negotiating team, said Wednesday evening.
“The board voted unanimously to ratify the contract, which was really exciting,” Albee said after the meeting. “We’re just waiting for the rest of our membership to vote before we can officially talk about the [terms of the contract].”
If ratified by teachers, the new contract will be retroactive to last summer and would run through Aug. 31, 2018, Lyons said.
Lyons said the agreement includes pay increases of roughly 2 to 3 percent a year for teachers and eliminates a controversial merit-based pay system adopted by the board and the union in late 2013, which many teachers said they considered demeaning and divisive.
During contract talks, teachers maintained, among other things, that they were being paid several thousand dollars less per year than their counterparts in Greater Bangor, according to an informational graphic posted on a Facebook page called Support Education in RSU 22. Teachers said the relatively low pay had led some to leave the district.
In March, the RSU 22 board took the unusual step of making public some of the terms of its latest contract offer to the district’s teachers during a meeting that drew a large crowd to Hampden Academy.
Board Chairman Niles Parker addressed the conflicts in a prepared statement he read at the start of the board meeting in March. The statement, which included a summary of the board’s final proposal, also was posted on the school district’s website.
Albee said Wednesday that while teachers who belong to the union are happy that they’ve made some progress, their work is not done.
“It’s been quite a trial but the union can officially say that we are happy that the board heard and understood what we had to say about performance pay,” she said. “As educators, we try to educate the people around us, so we really appreciate that they heard us on that.
“Moving forward, we still have a long way to go on salary, but one mountain at a time,” she said, adding, “we look forward to keeping education our No. 1 priority. Our kids come first.”
RSU 22’s member towns are Hampden, Newburgh, Winterport and Frankfort.