AKRON, Ohio — After months of negotiations, fact-finding and federal mediation sessions, the Akron Board of Education and the Akron Education Association, the union that represents the teachers, have come to a contract agreement and the two parties will avoid a strike, according to Pat Shipe, the president of the Akron Education Association.
What You Need To Know
- Akron Education Association approved a three-year contract with Akron Public Schools
- Contract came after several months of negotiations and a strike notice
- The contract is effective July 1, 2022 through June 30, 2025
“We have a contract,” Shipe said. “We have a lot of work to do still in the buildings.”
Monday night, the board voted to approve the tentative agreement and on Tuesday night, members of the union voted to accept the tentative agreement as well.
Shipe said regarding safety in schools, the board proposed changing the language in three sections of their contract.
“It’s not as much of a change to current contract language as the board seeking to remove or weaken contract language we already had,” she said. “That is what we were holding the line on. Anything from, of course, the big one from changing assault from contact to injury.”
The current contract language regarding assault will remain the same as the previous contract language.
“We have very clear and transparent current language in the contract. What we want is for the board to simply follow it, which they have not been doing,” Shipe said. “Any weakening of that language would also exacerbate an already violent and sometimes dangerous environment in some of our buildings.”
Another big sticking point in negotiations was teacher pay.
Educators will receive wage increases of 4%, 3% and 3.5% in the three-year deal.
“We really felt it necessary because we are losing so many educators in Akron that we had to take our wages to the place where we could attract and retain qualified people in the classroom,” said Shipe, adding that the district has around 20% of their teaching positions vacant.
The school district declined to do an interview on Wednesday, but we spoke with the new president of the Akron Board of Education, Derrick Hall, during Monday night’s board meeting.
He said he’s looking forward to building on this momentum, something Shipe echoed.
“There are still things we have to address because just signing a contract doesn’t make safety issues and discipline issues just magically go away,” Hall said. “What we came away with was unity.”
