North Ridgeville City Schools 5490 Mills Creek Lane North Ridgeville, Ohio 44039

(440) 327-4444 NRCS.net

This document was prepared to help clarify the many misconceptions and claims being made about the contract negotiations between North Ridgeville City Schools and the North Ridgeville Education Association. These misconceptions include claims about pay freezes, competiveness of teacher pay, teachers “fleeing” the District due to low salary, the Board team “dragging out” negotiations, and how a reserve policy and reserve balance works in a district. Again, the following information will help our community with the actual facts related to these items.

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT Contract negotiations with the North Ridgeville Education Association began last April. Those 12 months have included the back-and-forth exchanges on compensation and benefits typical to labor negotiations. However, there also have been a number of misstatements and mischaracterizations that, for a variety of reasons, have circulated widely and taken on lives of their own. We want to set the record straight with these straightforward, verifiable facts.  CLAIM: The salary and benefits package being offered to teachers includes a “freeze” of base pay that is “detrimental to a teacher’s career earnings.”  FACT: The offer is for a four-year contract. Here are some of the compensation details: o All teachers will receive pay increases in each of the four years of the contract. o For the current 2016-17 school year (which is nearly completed), teachers will receive a 2 percent cash stipend. o In each of the following three years, through 2020, teaches will receive annual 2 percent base salary increases. o The Board will fund the District’s Health Trust an additional $100,000 in each of the four years to help reduce teacher healthcare costs. o Teachers who work on special projects outside of their normal duties will get a 25 percent increase in that stipend, from the current $20 to $25 an hour for the duration of the contract.

And here is an easier way to consider how the compensation package offered by the Board helps teachers: When the automatic “step increases” in pay that most teachers receive each year are included, a North Ridgeville teacher with a bachelor’s degree, over the four years of this contract, will see a compensation increase of twenty percent (20%) in just three years – from $35,000 in 2017 to $42,045 in 2020. Teachers with Master’s degrees will go from $46,480 to $55,119, an 18.6 percent increase. Teachers in the category of “Master’s Plus 30” will increase from $60,270 to $70,198, up 16.5 percent.  CLAIM: North Ridgeville teachers are among the lowest paid in Lorain County’s 14 districts.  FACTS: Comparing teacher salaries across districts can be complicated. The main variable that establishes teacher compensation is experience. In general, a district with a less experienced teaching staff pays a lower average. In North Ridgeville, many teachers have retired in the last eight years, resulting in 25 percent of our teaching staff having five years of experience or less. Since most of our teachers stay with us, this number will continue to grow. Two fairer methods for comparing salaries are to examine the average income over the life of a career or examine the relative position of salaries within the salary schedule. Using this analysis, North Ridgeville teachers rank 7 of 14 Lorain County districts (including wealthier schools with higher tax bases). And how does our contract proposal compare? The proposed 2 percent annual increases in base salaries for fiscal years 2018, 2019 and 2020 exceed the increases in recent settlements in the Clearview (1.8 percent annual average), Avon (1.65 percent), Columbia (1.16 percent) and Keystone (1.08 percent) districts. Even though the use of comparisons between and among districts is of questionable value, given the unique characteristics of each school and community, it is clear that our offer is fair, equitable and competitive for teachers in our area.  CLAIM: North Ridgeville teachers are fleeing the District for other jobs because of the low pay.  FACTS: The numbers simply don’t support this claim. Only three (3) teachers have left for other teaching jobs in the past two years (one took a position in an identified poverty district to qualify for student loan forgiveness, another went to a private parochial school and a third went to an east suburban Cleveland district). Over the past five years, 90 teachers have left. But half of those teachers retired. Many of the other people who left our teaching positions did so because they were promoted to administrative positions or a spouse took a new job in another city or they experienced other life changes. We have had only eleven (11) teachers leave for other teaching positions in the last five years – eight (8) of those to Cuyahoga County districts, two (2) went to other districts in Lorain and one (1) to a parochial school position.

Moreover, when teaching jobs come open here, we average 72 applicants per job posting. Many more teachers want to come to North Ridgeville than want to leave. So, the reality does not match the myth. The reality is that North Ridgeville does better than most districts in retaining teachers. And here is another reality: We have hired well in North Ridgeville and now have a talented, energetic teaching staff ready to help lead us through our restructuring and into a new, exciting era that will be better for our students, teachers, staff and community.  CLAIM: The Board and Administration have dragged out the negotiation process so they don’t have to pay the teachers more for this school year.  FACT: Negotiations for this contract began in April of 2016 – and in many ways have actually gone quite well. The negotiators for management and the union worked very hard to come to agreement on numerous issues, including important issues involving class size, professional development, special education and more. We had seven productive bargaining sessions before reaching this impasse over just a few financial aspects. And since we reached impasse we now have engaged in four mediation sessions. The argument that the Board has dragged this process out to save money does not stand up to scrutiny – and actually does not make sense. The contract proposal now before the union leadership includes 2 percent more pay for the teachers for this school year – even though the year is rapidly reaching an end. Also, historically, the current contract negotiations don’t even qualify as lengthy. The contract signed in 2014 came after 15 months of negotiations, for example. Remember, too, that the involvement of the Federal Mediator means that meetings are only scheduled by FMCS, which must take into account the schedules of all participants in determining meeting dates. We respect the bargaining process. But we have made clear to the union leadership that this is a fair offer with healthy compensation – and that it is the last and best offer.

 CLAIM: North Ridgeville’s insistence on having a large reserve fund is taking money away from teachers and parking it in a bank account – where it can’t do teachers, students or the community any good.

 FACT: North Ridgeville has adopted a 90-day reserve fund guideline. While this is only an accounting guideline and the money is always available for whatever purpose the Board determines is necessary for operating the District, we believe it is an important commitment to fiscal responsibility – and it will save our taxpayers money. The 90-day guideline says that we should always have enough cash on hand to cover the equivalent of 90 days of expenses. In addition to sound fiscal strategy, what the 90-day policy means is that we’re saving North Ridgeville taxpayers money. Moody’s Investors Service recently upgraded our school district’s bond rating to Aa2 from Aa3. Because of that, it costs us less to borrow money for projects. In an October 2016 report, Moody’s cited the healthy reserve fund as one of the key factors behind the improved grade. We want to compensate our teachers as fairly as we can. But we will always balance that desire with an equally fervent belief that our spending must correspond to our community’s ability to pay and our need to sustain current programming. This contract proposal does that. A contract that exceeds our last, best and final offer would mean we must ask our taxpayers for more money via levy on the ballot prior to 2019, in order to maintain the current level of services to our students. That’s why this is our final offer.

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