UEA Teachers Overwhelmingly Reject Final UCS Contract Proposal

January 24, 2020, UTICA, Mich. – Utica Education Association (UEA) teachers have overwhelmingly rejected what Utica Community Schools (UCS) stated was their last contract offer in a vote announced this evening. Only 13% of the 1,445 UEA members voted to ratify the contract.

The contract offer from UCS covered a three-year period, including the 2019-20 school year. The UEA and its nearly 1,500 teachers have been without a contract since June 30, 2019 as negotiations have now reached a duration of 11-months, including the last two months in front of a state appointed mediator.

“This vote to reject the District’s take-it-or-leave-it-offer showed this process has made our teachers unhappy, devalued and disenfranchised,” said UEA President Liza Parkinson, who defined the UCS final offer as a “slap in the face of teachers who have been making major salary concessions in the school district for the past nine years. More importantly, this offer showed disrespect for our children who deserve a classroom where their teachers are paid what they’re worth and who aren’t looking at retiring early or moving to another school district. We’ve lost 13 of these teachers already this year. This is unprecedented in UCS.”

The UEA bargaining team went to the table with UCS last year hoping to gain restoration of 4½ lost wage steps over the past nine years, which preserved the district’s financial and academic stability. This has cost teachers at least $65 million dollars. UEA members were hopeful that UCS would follow the lead of neighboring districts and honor this sacrifice as the district’s financial bottom line has improved. The rejected final offer from UCS would restore only one of those 41/2 lost steps. UCS will claim that the offer, worth $19.5 million, was generous. However, teachers with more than 11 years in service, representing 60% of the membership, each gave back $2,500 in negotiated furlough days in the past two years, but would only receive a total of $800 per year under UCS’ final three-year offer following 10 years of a frozen salary schedule. The UEA bargaining team did not approve the financial portion of the package but wanted to give the members an opportunity to vote on it. “This final offer from UCS only validated the disrespect our teachers feel and expressed in our climate survey earlier this year,” said Parkinson.

The UEA climate survey, issued to teachers in October, 2019, showed the depths of member’s disgust with how they’ve been treated by UCS. When asked if their work was “valued by UCS,” only 7% of nearly 1,300 respondents said yes. Asked if they felt respected by the school District, teachers again responded with only a 7% yes response. When UEA teachers were asked if they’d recommend the District as a “great place to work,” 94% failed to give a positive response. Only 2% of respondents said UCS values employee feedback, suggestions and input, while only 7% said they felt “respected” by UCS and 96% could not give a positive response to the question “Does UCS care about its employees?”

The survey was issued in response to a Forbes Magazine designation which claimed UCS was one of the “Best Places to Work” in Michigan. Research regarding the Forbes designation methodology by the UEA public relations firm, found among other things; the poll was conducted by a German polling firm used by Forbes which incorporated a blind online survey awarding participants gift cards for participating; none of the respondents knew what the reason for the poll was; the German firm only polled “as few as 40 people” in one of the largest school districts in the state, half of them not even employees of UCS: and a representative of the polling firm, Statista Gmbh, said they had “no idea” how many, if any, teachers actually participated in the poll.

UCS celebrated the Forbes designation by paying $6,000 for a one-year use of the “Best Places to Work” logo and thousands more on radio, print and TV advertising, signs for each school and additionally issued a press release, further disrespecting UEA teachers who had made nine years of concessions and were working without a contract.

Now that the UEA has rejected the UCS contract offer, the UEA will now look at options available to them which could include going back to mediation, fact finding, or engaging in a work action, which the members approved overwhelmingly as an option last Fall.