By JOSEPH KELLARD
The board agreed to a three-year contract that will give members of the Oceanside Federation of Teachers a 3.5 percent annual salary increase and that rolls over a four-year contract with identical terms set to expire in 2007.
³I think it¹s beneficial to the community and to the staff to not have to go through what is, at times, unpleasant negotiations,² said OFT President Leslie Krasnoff. ³It assures us a few more years of working cooperatively together through contract negotiation. ... And this percentage enables our people to keep up with inflation. It¹s a fair contract for the district and the union.²
³I think the increases are fair to the taxpayers and fair to the teachers,² said Superintendent Dr. Herb Brown. ³And I think not having labor negotiations to be concerned with next year allows us to move forward and keep everybody focused on improving teaching and learning without distractions.²
Board President Al Lyson called the contract ³appropriate and beneficial to the district all the way around,² and added, ³What we¹ve done is stopped the nonsense of black shirts. We have a very good group of teachers here, and when it gets down to negotiations, everything gets ugly for no good reason.²
In years past, Oceanside teachers wore black shirts to school at contract time as a symbol of unity. After their contract expired in June 2001, the OFT and the district took until that December to settle on a new one. The 2002 four-year contract proposed a 14 percent salary and ³step² increase for teachers, and called on them to work 15 minutes more each day and to take courses on professional staff development, requiring 10 hours a year from tenured teachers and 20 from probationary teachers. In November 2003, the board voted to extend that contract by two years, from June 2005 to June 2007, the terms of which called for a continued 3.5 percent yearly salary increase.
Prior to passing the latest contract extension on Jan. 30, the board and the district contacted some 20 other county school districts that had already settled their contracts, and Oceanside followed their lead in offering its teachers an average yearly increase of 3.5 to 4.0 percent. ³You don¹t want to get out of line with what¹s going on throughout the county,² Lyson said, ³because all that means is that you¹re going to lose good teachers to another district for no good reason.²
The Rockville Centre school district and its teachers¹ union, for example, enacted a new contract last summer that will raise teachers¹ salaries by 3.75 percent the first year and by 3.5 percent each subsequent year until 2010. It will take effect in July 2006. In return, RVC teachers essentially agreed to double their health care contributions.
³When you look at the New York metropolitan cost of living, [the increases are] at or about the cost of living,² said RVC Superintendent Dr. William Johnson.
OFT members overwhelmingly voted for the new contract, Krasnoff said. Asked what teachers might have found objectionable if they had waited to negotiate a new contract next year, she said, ³We didn¹t even get into talking about that, because we already had another year on the current contract. But in other schools, the districts are looking for givebacks. And any time you open your contract, everything is up for grabs. We have a contract, we¹d like to keep it, and this enables us to do this.²
Meanwhile, in the Lawrence school district, the teachers have been without a contract since July 2005. Lawrence teachers are the second-highest-paid teachers in the county, with a median salary of about $78,000.
Teachers in Oceanside earn an average of about $70,000 a year, Brown estimated. ³While the salaries are certainly not the highest in the county, they are fair,² he said.
Brown also guessed that teachers stay in the Oceanside district an average of 20 to 25 years, and that if a district staff has many senior people, then the average salary will be higher. ³It really depends on how many senior people are working and making the top salaries,² he said. ³So it really depends on the year that you ask.²
Comments about this story? JKellard@liherald.com or (516) 569-400 ext. 287.
