Montgomery County teachers and school staff are focusing on quality-of-life issues as school system officials come to contract negotiations lacking the resources to offer raises.
School employees gave up a scheduled 5 percent raise for the current school year — the third year of a three-year contract — as a result of emergency negotiations last fall to address the county’s budget shortfall. Negotiations are have started for 2010-2013, and teachers don’t want to feel skunked.
“The paperwork burdens are tremendous and annoying,” said Eric Luedtke, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at Silver Spring’s Mario Loiederman Middle School.
With a raise out of the question, Luedtke said he hopes the district will make concessions that allow teachers more time to focus on teaching. He detailed the hours spent transferring the same attendance numbers from one computer program to another and the dozens of forms required to fill out for each special education student.
And then there are the meetings.
“We have e-mail, we use e-mail,” he said. “So what’s the point of a meeting where all we learn is something we could’ve read by e-mail?”
Luedtke said he doesn’t put all of the blame on Montgomery County — many of the issues stem from the accountability called for by the federal No Child Left Behind law. But he said he would like to see the district do more to ensure that “teachers have a greater say in what’s happening.”
That could mean rethinking teachers’ schedules or shifting job descriptions to allow them more time in the actual classroom, said Doug Prouty, president of the Montgomery County Education Association, representing the district’s 12,000 teachers and counselors.
“We’re always focusing on salaries and benefits, but we recognize that this year will be different in that regard,” Prouty said.
Despite a stagnant paycheck, officials negotiated last year for teachers’ health care premiums to remain the same.
Health care is expected to cost about $199 million of the system’s $2.2 billion budget this year, or about $24 million more than it cost last year.
Health care costs “have been growing over a number of years,” said district budget director Marshall Spatz. “It probably accounts for the biggest factor of increase that we have.”
