A state-appointed mediator has set a March 11 date for contract talks between the Becton Education Association (BEA) and the Carlstadt-East Rutherford Board of Education. The step represents the latest attempt to break the long-standing stalemate between the BOE and the teachers’ union, which has left the latter working without a contract since June of 2006.

Contention centers on the perennial issues of salary and benefits. The board hopes to limit pay raises as it faces a budget crunch brought on by a slowing economy and state law that caps tax levy increases. They also hope to restructure benefit packages in response to swelling insurance premiums, according to Becton business administrator Nicholas Annitti.

"Every school district is looking to control costs," said Annitti.

The BEA is holding out for larger, retroactive raises that would cover time spent working with no contract, and hopes to maintain their current benefits plans, says Association President Dorothy Maggio.

"The board changed our benefits plan a few years ago. The staff seems to be quite satisfied with it, and I believe the Board saved $60,000, so I’m not sure what they are looking for as far as additional changes," said Maggio.

The mediation process involves one or more meetings at which the respective camps sit in separate rooms while the mediator shuttles offers and counters between the two. The session itself will occur some four months after board officials decided in November to send the process into mediation.

The delay is attributable in part to the cumbersome process itself, which requires both parties to coordinate with the state Public Employment Relations Commission (PERC) on evaluating potential mediators and furnishing a list of available meeting dates. This proved to be no easy task, as the state employs only a handful of mediators to deal with the forty-plus districts currently in various stages of the process. Miscommunication further hampered progress. At one point, the BEA was given a date for a February meeting, but that information apparently never reached the school board, and so the meeting was scrapped.

But Maggio says that the Becton board’s own stonewalling shares the blame.

"The most frustrating thing about these negotiations is that the board is satisfied with this pace," she said.

Indeed, the board’s structure provides bureaucratic hurdles of its own. The practice of rotating its presidency between Carlstadt and East Rutherford each year has meant that the body’s negotiating committee has had three different chairs since talks began.

"We spent most of our negotiating meetings catching everybody up to where we left off the last time," said Maggio.

But state law that forbids boards from saving money by changing benefits plans as long as they are locked in negotiations would seem to present a impetus for the board to settle the dispute.

Next Steps

If no resolution is reached after one or more mediation sessions, the process moves into a "fact-finding" phase. Each side prepares a detailed report on its position — which may include information on local economic profiles, budget histories, and figures from similar districts — for the review of a state-appointed fact-finder. The fact-finder then uses this material to create a third proposal for the consideration of both parties. The fact-finding process can often take many months. If either side rejects the final proposal, the cycle starts anew with a "super-conciliator", a mediator with a broader set of powers to keep the parties at a negotiating table until an agreement is reached. The state has no provisions for legally binding arbitration.

Annitti believes that hopes for settling the contract issues in the first round of mediation rest with the teachers.

"It all depends on them. If they become reasonable in their requests, we’ll be fine. Otherwise, I could see it going [the fact-finding] route," he said.

While Annitti declined to comment on the numbers and percentages involved in the disagreement, a separate source close to the negotiations echoed his sentiment. "Everybody knows what the county averages [for pay raises] are," the source said. "If what the teachers were asking for was even close to that, the board would settle."

The area is no stranger to prolonged teacher contract negotiations. The last round of talks between the East Rutherford Board of Education (ERBOE) and the teachers’ union finally ended in October of 2006 after nearly four years of impasse. That dispute went through the mediation and fact-finding phases, and was in danger of reaching an impasse after several meetings with the super-conciliator, something that has never happened under the current scheme.

"There was no agreement after a few rounds with the super-conciliator," said Michael Homaychak, who was president of ERBOE during the negotiations. "Ninety-five percent of the action happened at the last meeting. Things finally gelled."

The biggest challenge facing school boards that approve raises in excess of the legal tax levy increase is finding money to fund the changes.

"The pot of money is fixed," said Homaychak. "Anything above that four percent and you’ve got to cut from books or computers or somewhere else."

Last year, budget constraints forced Becton to make program cuts, including halving the music program and eliminating the school play.