Teachers from the Association of Catholic Teachers rejected the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s contract offer Sept. 6 and have gone on strike a day before archdiocesan high schools are slated to open. Archdiocesan high schools will open, however, staffed by administrators and non-union employees, according to Mary Rochford, archdiocesan superintendent of schools.
“Every school has its plan and is ready to go,” she said during a press conference that she and Dr. Richard McCarron, secretary for Catholic Education, held at the archdiocesan office center after the teachers’ strike had been announced.
Rochford said the customary three-day orientation that opens the archdiocesan school year would take place as usual – with freshmen starting on Wednesday, seniors on Thursday in some schools, and the remainder of the upperclassmen on Friday, as is the norm at each high school.
McCarron, who focused his comments on negotiations with the teachers association, said the Archdiocese had contacted the association and was willing to resume negotiations.
“This is not a contract for the past, it’s a contract for the future,” McCarron said. “If we are to educate our students to enter a very rapidly changing world, then we need to be able to deliver the educational services that are going to prepare them for this world. That doesn’t necessarily mean holding on to the same ways we have done things.”
“It is a sad day for the Archdiocese,” he said, “because we are here to educate 16,500 students, and their well-being and our parents’ concern for their education is (paramount) to us.”
McCarron said that although the archdiocesan team presented proposals Aug. 3, Aug. 23 and “as late as beginning days of (September),” the teachers association did not respond to many of them.
Nevertheless, archdiocesan negotiators “will return to the table in good faith, and we seek a just contract for our teachers,” he said. “We are ready and willing to do whatever we have to do in terms of resuming those negotiations to make this happen.”
McCarron answered questions about the contract proposal rejected Sept. 6, which was characterized by the teachers association as “disrespectful.”
“This is not a contract for the past, it’s a contract for the future,” McCarron said. “If we are to educate our students to enter a very rapidly changing world, then we need to be able to deliver the educational services that are going to prepare them for this world. That doesn’t necessarily mean holding on to the same ways we have done things.”
“It is a watershed contract,” he added, “in the fact that this is the first time the significant discussion has not been about salary and benefits. It has been (about) the delivery of educational services.”
He said many of the archdiocesan proposals will better enable archdiocesan schools to meet changing educational needs through the hiring of part-time teachers.
He singled out modern language programs in particular, where plans to establish courses in Farsi and to expand existing two-year Mandarin Chinese courses to four years would require hiring teachers with specialized skills.
Hiring part-time teachers is one of the proposals that have proven troublesome in the contract. McCarron said the teachers had been misinformed by their association leadership about the implications of the part-time hires.
“They were told this morning that (we) want part-time teachers to replace full-time teachers. That’s incorrect,” he said. “We have said across the table all summer long that when the student-teacher ratio is defined, no part-time teacher will ever replace a full-time teacher.”
McCarron was also asked about “constriction and bumping,” another aspect of the contract the teachers association has called out as imperiling job security because if the student population is reduced at a school, certain teachers are constricted or “bumped” from the faculty to retain the established student-teacher ratio.
In previous years, the teachers were automatically assigned to a new school. The proposed contract changes the procedure.
“What we have proposed,” McCarron said, “is a constriction table that takes into account (a teacher’s) seniority, years of service, their academic degrees, their contributions to the school community, anything that would be co-curricular.
“They would then be interviewed by a school that had an opening and the principal would explain what the school culture is and what the expectations are for that particular academic program, and if the teacher passed the interview, the teacher would be hired.”
McCarron concluded the conference by saying, “We have gone back with a significant compromise on our part yesterday, and we will talk at the table about this.”
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