Neither side’s assertions are easily verifiable from information available to the public in brief news reports. No one should expect transparency to be some magic way of making everyone happy. But a lot of bad feelings stem from failure to disclose the terms of proposals actually on the table (the full terms, not just the bits that will sound best or worst to whichever audience you are trying to reach).

The board president’s statement contains one puzzling line: “The item that has been most at issue, however, has been teacher accountability.” I wish he’d said what he meant by that.

The story is about a teachers strike called for tomorrow, February 4, in the Penn Hills SD (Allegheny County). Here are the two sentences:

The district said in a statement that the teachers trimmed their salary requests from 15 percent to 6 percent a year after it became public.
…
“Don’t believe everything you read by the board,” Union spokesman Butch Santicola told KDKA-TV. “It’s designed to misdirect and miscommunicate and put pressure on the teachers.”

What’s wrong here?

The first of those sentences is based on a statement at the board website, published on February 2:

Prior to December of 2009, the District had withdrawn several of their proposed changes and agreed to contract language proposed by the Teachers’ Union, but the Teachers’ Union made no changes except to reduce its wage demand from 15% a year to 6% a year but only after the 15% demand was publicized.

One problem is that it appears that the school board waited a long time to expose an initially outrageous salary demand — a 15% pay raise the union would not have dared to make in public. If so, this is a textbook example of how closed-doors negotiations allow a union to stall…and stall…and stall — all while maintaining a public posture of reasonableness. The articles I found online suggest that as soon as the board publicized that 15% demand last summer, the union lowered it dramatically. Here’s a news report of the union response:

After school officials revealed details of the union’s initial salary and benefits request, the union’s representatives asked board members and other officials to sign an agreement not to speak publicly about the talks.

No surprise there. Any private party (e.g., a building contractor, a fuel oil supplier, or an insurance company) making a non-competitive bid for public money would prefer to have its bid kept confidential until after it’s been accepted.

Now consider the second sentence from he article: Mr. Santicola’s implication that the board statement is false, or at least misleading. For all I know, he may be right. So why doesn’t he correct the record by publishing the actual union position?

If there’s a strike, and it looks as if there will be, the Penn Hill kids and their parents will be hurt. The public doesn’t have to know about every tentative idea and every trial balloon floated in the process of trying to read an agreement. The public is entitled to read and evaluate all written, potentially binding proposals made by both the union and the board. There’s no excuse for a process that asks the public to take sides based on unsupported charges, counter-charges, rumors and insinuations.

That spreadsheet packs a punch. Of the district’s more than 700 teachers, many are at what must be the top of the salary scale: $98,222. Salaries over $80,000 are common — possibly in the majority. (I didn’t count.) Add benefit packages, almost all in the $22,000-$30,000 range, and you get a picture of a staff that’s very well compensated. These figures do not, of course, impute any value to near-absolute job security in all kinds of economic weather.

The board and the union have had a first meeting to renegotiate a contract due to expire June 30. A January 15 story in the Bucks Local News quotes the union negotiator noting that the union agreed last year to a salary freeze during a one-year extension of the current contract. (That was a smart move and perhaps not too painful, given the salaries in question.) Naturally, he declined to be specific about the union’s current proposal. He’s quoted as saying, “in the sense that money is tighter, budgeting will require more creativity in terms of funding from the school board.”

A spokesperson for the board describes the district’s financial difficulties. It remains to be seen whether the board will publish its proposal, along with the union’s, once both offers are actually on the table.

At present the district’s website has nothing that really helps a reader understand how the negotiations now underway can actually affect future taxes — or teacher retention, if that’s a valid issue. The site does include a copy of the current budget in a format basically like that required for reports to PDE.