When the Legislature’s Education Committee meets today to consider ways to amend the school consolidation law, one of the thorny issues it will address is the law’s requirement that new regional school units unify staff contracts.

Many planning committees have concluded that the requirement will increase the costs to the new RSUs, and for some, those increases might become a deal breaker that could scuttle the consolidation process altogether. State education officials have acknowledged the potential for cost increases and have indicated they will review the law to see whether there are ways to soften the blow.

The law requires that when a new RSU is formed, all teachers and school employees must be transferred to and employed by the new regional school unit, and that all the separate collective-bargaining units representing one class of employees merge into one regionwide unit that will negotiate a single contract.

The merger into RSU bargaining units is not subject to approval or disapproval by employees represented by each bargaining unit.

The law requires that the bargaining units merge as soon as possible after the reorganization takes place. It likely will be several years, however, before a merged unit negotiates a single RSU-wide contract. The law also requires that the new RSU honor all existing contracts to their expiration dates. Interim agreements must be negotiated so that contracts expire at the same time, unless both sides agree otherwise.

The contract issue has not been addressed in the proposed amendments from the commissioner or legislators, but that could change this week as the Education Committee reviews proposed amendments to the law.

The committee has allotted time during today’s session to hear from organizations in the state that have had experience with collective bargaining, such as the Maine State Management Association, the Maine Education Association and the Maine Municipal Association, among others.

According to state Sen. Peter Mills, R-Skowhegan, a member of the Education Committee, the issue of collective bargaining is a major barrier for the RSUs and one that the Legislature needs to deal with. In some districts, he said, salaries can be “widely disparate” and the planning committees will have to find ways to bring them together.

Mills said he hopes that among those state groups there may be ideas on how to deal with the issue.

“I suggested to the committee that we bring them in and hear their proposals,” he said. “We need to hear their ideas on what we need to do to fix this.”

Salaries in RSU 10

What became apparent as regional planning committees worked through the process was that the mergers and the requirement for a unified contract would result in an equalization of salaries and benefits for teachers and support staff. But those salaries and benefits in some cases vary widely among the merging school districts. Bringing lower salaries and benefit packages up to the higher levels, planning committees said, would create significant cost increases for the new school units.

“In the best-case scenario, you bring everybody up to the best position of the several contracts,” said Robert Webster, superintendent of Union 76, which includes Brooklin, Sedgwick and the Deer Isle-Stonington CSD. “That assumes that those at the best positions would be willing to freeze their benefits and salaries to allow everyone else to catch up. That’s not a terribly realistic scenario given the nature of collective bargaining.”

Each of the three school districts in Union 76 now negotiates its own contract with a local bargaining unit, so the salaries and benefit packages vary. According to Webster, equalizing salaries and benefits for teachers and staff within the union, and assuming no staffing or other changes or increases, would result in a cost increase of $358,039.

The increase would be much higher to equalize all salaries and benefits in the seven school districts in the proposed RSU 10 which includes Union 76 and Union 93 (Blue Hill, Brooksville, Castine and Penobscot), Webster said.

Ben Wootten, co-chair of the RSU 10 regional planning committee, noted that while the support staff in Blue Hill is unionized, employees in other school districts in the proposed RSU are not. Equalizing salaries among those employees would drive up costs, he said.

“The bigger the bargaining unit, the bigger the contract,” he said. “I don’t see, given that upward trend in contracts, how this reorganization is going to save money for anyone over time.”

A potential deal breaker

Other school districts have identified similar cost increases stemming from unified contracts, and those costs have raised concerns for the regional planning committee in the Bucksport area. Although that committee has completed some the required items in the department consolidation checklist, committee members noted recently that the costs involved in equalizing salaries could block the regionalization effort among the towns of Bucksport, Orland, Verona and Prospect.

In a letter to the commissioner last month, Rob Howard and Laurie Boardman, planning committee co-chairs, wrote that the combined costs of increasing salaries and benefits for teachers and educational technicians will be more than $200,000, assuming the RSU keeps the same number of positions.

“This will have a negative impact on whether our citizens will support reorganization,” they wrote.

Many anticipate that, with so many districts and towns merged into RSUs, negotiating sessions will be difficult at best, particularly when many committee members are used to being directly involved in negotiations. Others believe that professional negotiators will be needed, particularly in negotiations for the first unified contract.

While Maine has created large school districts in the past that have handled contract negotiations successfully, Webster noted that those districts were formed voluntarily. The attitude toward the process might be different, he said, given the “shotgun-wedding” approach that is forcing formation of the RSUs and bargaining units.

Increases and reductions

According to the state, the projected increases in salaries and benefits are not necessarily a foregone conclusion.

“There is nothing in the law that requires the contracts to go to the highest existing salary or to the highest benefits package,” according to Department of Education spokesman David Connerty-Marin. “They will have to form a single bargaining unit. There’s no predicting what the results of negotiations after that point will be.”

The department will meet with the Maine Labor Relations Board to make sure that interpretation is correct, he said.

Absent a requirement, however, Connerty-Marin acknowledged there likely will be some increase in salaries as a result of negotiations in the new RSUs. That rise in teacher salaries fits with the governor’s efforts to increase teachers’ pay throughout the state, even before the consolidation law was proposed.

“There probably will be some upward pressure on the salaries,” he said. “That’s not a bad thing. We think teachers should be paid more.”

He noted that more than half of the school districts in the state spend less on teachers’ salaries than is allowed under the state’s Essential Programs and Services benchmarks.

“They could be spending more on salaries and not be above EPS,” he said. “That’s an indication that the money is being spent elsewhere.”

One of the goals of the consolidation law, he noted, was to reduce administrative costs in order to direct more funding into the classrooms.

The department will examine the issue to see whether there is language in the law that would allow the RSUs to make the process more flexible, he said. There may be some creative ways to make changes within the salary scales so that the effects of the increased costs are not felt all at once, he said.

rhewitt@bangordailynews.net

667-9394