The North Penn SD (Montgomery County) deserves kudos for a web page posting the “final best” offers of the board and teachers union. (The same page has links to a long series of “board updates.” I haven’t read them, but it looks as if the board has made a good faith effort at transparency.)
[Note: My original version of this post incorrectly used "East Penn" in its headline. East Penn's impressive "dashboard" display must have shorted out too many of my brain cells. Thanks to Paul Fisher for catching the error.]
The North Penn site is very good. My only criticism of what I read is that the proposals — especially the one from the union — remain hard to understand. The board, to its credit, published the actual salary schedule it’s offering. This means that you can see exactly how much any teacher will earn in dollars, based on length of experience and graduate credits acquired. By contrast, the union shows its proposed increases in annual percentage terms (3.5%, 4% and 4%) “plus increment.” That “plus increment,” negotiations jargon for “seniority-based step increase,” would drive average cost up well beyond the percentages listed. And most readers may not understand that the percentages are (almost certainly) averages and can be rigged in any given year to maximize the size of those unspecified “increments.”
Obscurity is standard operating procedure for union negotiators when they’re forced to go public with their proposals at all. Boards shouldn’t go along with the game, and the North Penn hasn’t. The real neglect of duty comes from the Pennsylvania Department of Education — not to mention the PSBA — either of which could put some effort into standardizing clear and informative ways to present competing contract offers.
A sort of postscript: Apparently the union has been complaining that the board’s updates suggest an anti-teacher attitude. On that point a comment online from The Reporter nails it:
The information that the school board is sending out in the mailers is to inform the community about the true status of the teacher contract talks. It is not teacher bashing or teacher hating. It simply illustrates the difference in how much it would cost to cave in to the union’s demands.
