With teacher contract talks under way, St. Paul Public Schools officials are publicizing how much they can afford in hopes of not repeating past mistakes.
The district’s administration and school board on Wednesday released a three-year plan for negotiating with their employee unions. Priorities include boosting compensation for the lowest earners without exacerbating the budget woes that have plagued the district in recent years.
The strategy includes establishing each year exactly how much the district has to spend on contracts across all employee groups. In past years, they haven’t taken such a comprehensive look.
“We’re starting from a big-picture perspective,” human resources director Laurin Cathey said. “We know what we want to spend.”
Cathey said district leaders considered a freeze on employee raises before agreeing they can find the money for a 1 percent overall increase. That’s in addition to wage increases based on experience and education.
Cathey said the superintendent and school board are unified on the strategy, which hasn’t been the case in past negotiations.
In both 2014 and 2016, board members joined teacher contract negotiations for a final marathon session.
Board members came to regret the 2014 deal months later, when confronted with major budget cuts for the following year. The 2016 deal spent $3.5 million more than the district said it could afford.
The district Wednesday published a webpage that will provide public updates on negotiations, as the St. Paul Federation of Teachers historically has done.
Cathey hopes that greater transparency about the district’s goals will encourage union leaders to make more “reasonable” proposals.
“We recognized that the old way we were negotiating wasn’t working,” he said.
Among the district’s principles are granting schools the flexibility to spend their money as they see fit.
That conflicts with the teachers union’s proposals to maintain limits on class sizes and to mandate the hiring of various nonteaching positions, such as social workers and librarians.
Class-size caps can hurt enrollment and state funding, but they’re popular among teachers and parents.
Federation president Nick Faber said St. Paul is a diverse district that needs class-size limits.
“We want to be able to meet the needs of every one of our kids,” he said. “We’re not able to address those needs when you have one teacher with 28 or 30 kindergartners in a room.”
The two sides also figure to clash again over revenue sources.
Cathey said the district still wants to participate in Q Comp, the state’s performance-pay program, which if funded by the state could bring St. Paul some $9 million a year.
Faber instead wants the district to join the union in asking for more money from local sources — property owners through a 2018 tax referendum, and voluntary payments from wealthy private colleges, hospitals and major businesses, which pay little or no property taxes.
“We’re interested in finding dollars that are actually there,” Faber said.
Negotiations on the teacher contract resume Oct. 12. Cathey hopes to reach a deal in December, but the last two contracts weren’t settled until February.