On Thursday, Aug. 22, Evesham Township School District staff held a rally outside of the district’s administrative building on South Maple Avenue. The rally preceded the regularly scheduled board of education meeting that took place later that evening. Protest signs read, “Tell the board that school employees need a contract now.”
Contract negotiations between the board and the Evesham Township Education Association, which began back in February, came to a standstill this year, and as of right now, district staff will be heading into work this September without a contract and without their yearly raise.
“We’ve made little to no progress at all,” said ETEA Vice President Russ Bowles of the negotiation process so far.
According to Bowles and ETEA President Debbie Van Curren, this is the first time in 14 years that the board and the ETEA have been unable to negotiate a contract by the start of a new school year. The rally was an attempt to spread awareness to the public about what has been going on in the district.
“We’re hoping to make the people that pay the taxes that actually pay our salaries aware because a lot of people are unaware of what is going on, especially the people who don’t have children in the schools,” said Curren.
The past few years have seen a steady increase in the cost of health-care coverage for district employees, says Bowles, and it has had a significant and detrimental effect on salaries across the board.
“Every time we do get a raise, while it looks like a raise on paper, because our contributions also go up with our health care it washes those raises out. We’re not able to move forward. We have people who haven’t had raises in years,” said Bowles.
The association ultimately hopes to negotiate a three-year contract with the board. Last year, negotiations ended in July with a one-year contract.
“The board, knowing that they were losing state funding, said they needed some time for planning purposes and they couldn’t give us the normal three-year contract, so they’ve had more than a year now to figure it out and here we are,” said Bowles.
Melissa Walker is a teacher at DeMasi Middle School with 15 years in the district and a master’s degree under her belt. Her story is shared by many in the district who have had to either take on a second job or make significant life changes to make ends meet.
“I’m bringing home less money now than I did six years ago,” said Walker.
Being a mother, she is unable to commit to a second job and has resorted to taking out pension loans to stay afloat.
“We’ve had to scale back a lot, get rid of cars and downsize a lot. We’ve cut cable, we lost a vacation because we couldn’t afford it, it was too much,” said Walker.
Like Walker, Linda Masterman has been with the district for a considerable amount of time, teaching at Marlton Middle School for the past 25 years, and shares many of the same struggles.
“With the way things are set up now, I make less every year than the year before. In 2016, I made $2,000 less than in 2014, and that’s a continuing trend because the way our insurance is set up you pay a percentage of the policy based on how much you make, so the more you make, the more you pay,” said Masterman. “Most teachers I know have two and three jobs because you can’t live in New Jersey on a teacher’s salary.”
In addition to teaching, Masterman has taken on tutoring, curriculum writing and homebound instruction to make up for her dwindling salary.
At that evening’s board of education meeting, Bowles estimated they had a little over 100 people who showed up to support district staff. The board heard from teachers like Walker and Masterman, but did not offer any comment or plan going forward.
District officials declined a request for comment from The Sun.
According to Bowles, however, the evening did end in progress as he and other ETEA officials were approached by Superintendent John Scavelli, who earlier dropped a bombshell on the meeting by announcing he would be resigning from the district in February, who assured them that he had spoken with the board and they have prepared a counter offer.
The ETEA is working on setting up a meeting date to discuss the board’s offer.
“I would consider that progress for sure,” said Bowles. “We want to make sure we see our people get a raise and it’s going to be dependent on what they offer. I hope they are coming to the table with something decent so we can put an end to it, but I guess we’ll see in the coming weeks.”
