After getting word earlier in the evening about savings on Foster School construction, the Evanston/Skokie District 65 board continued the good news on Monday night, unanimously passing a new contract for the District 65 Educators’ Council (the local teachers’ union).
After working without a contract since August, the union struck a deal with the board and administration before Thanksgiving and ratified the contract late last week with nearly 80% support from membership.
Joey Hailpern and Omar Salem, who represented the board in negotiations, said the new deal is for four years, with this academic year representing the first year. Financially, Hailpern said, the agreement includes a 2.3% base pay raise for all teachers this year, the equivalent of the inflation rate — but with a floor of 2% and a ceiling of 2.27% — for years two and three and a 2.27% bump in year four.
‘Steps’ and ‘tracks’
Additionally, the district has a pay schedule for all educators that includes 22 “steps” and five “tracks.” Every teacher goes up one step after each year of work they complete, and each step includes some kind of pay raise. The raise between years is different, but across all 22 steps, it averages out to about 2.7%, Hailpern and Salem said. Moving tracks accounts for a bigger change in pay, which teachers can achieve by taking on additional roles such as helping with summer school or getting an additional certification or degree.
Salem also stressed that the base pay raise for this year is retroactive to the beginning of the year.
“I know there’s been some questions about, is 2.3% enough? That’s just the base. So that means every single cell in the salary schedule goes up by 2.3[%], and then there’s the step increase that Joey mentioned, which means we have ranges anywhere from 3.2[%] all the way up to pushing 7%.”
Also, for teachers who use family or PPO health insurance plans, the district is picking up an additional 1% of the premium per year over the four years as a benefit.
Retirement benefit
In addition, District 65 is flipping its retirement incentives from post-retirement to pre-retirement, Hailpern said. That means a teacher can pick a retirement date up to four years in advance and unlock a 6% annual raise for each of those years. The district already provided that same benefit after retirement, but this change lets the administration plan further ahead and recruit replacements earlier.
“We have a very senior staff. There’s a lot of people on the late years of the salary schedule. So as people retire, there’s a lot of less experienced people coming into the organization,” said Hailpern, explaining that one opportunity included in the contract is a stipend for teachers who become mentors for younger educators. “As that need for mentorship increases, we want to make sure that rate is commensurate so that people want to be mentors.”
District 65 teachers’ union, board approve new contract is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.