After more than four hours of mediation talks, Croton-Harmon district and school workers fail to reach agreement.
The next mediation date is not until March 20, although informal talks may continue.
Yesterday, January 13, representatives of the Croton-Harmon school district and the Aides of Croton United (ACU) met with a mediator for more than four hours at district headquarters on Gerstein Street. The talks, which began at 3 pm and went into the evening, did not produce an agreement. The detailed background to the contract negotiations can be found at this recent post in the Chronicle.
Shortly after the talks finished, the ACU Executive Board, in an email to the entire membership the Chronicle has obtained, broke the news that the mediation would not resume until March 20. This means that members will have to continue working under their old three-year contract—which expired last June 31—for another two months at least.
While it was not clear why the talks will have wait that long to continue, ACU leadership has made it clear to the members that this was not their choice.
“We have done everything that we could do,” the Executive Board wrote.
ACU president Jean Avolio declined to comment, citing the confidentiality of the talks. (The district has repeatedly declined to comment as well over the past many months.) However, we understand from sources that discussions between the two sides may continue informally between now and the official mediation date. Such informal discussions have occurred in the recent past but failed to result in an agreement.
The failure to reach an agreement means that school workers will continue to work at their current low pay, in some cases for only the minimum wage (see the starting pay for a position of Lunch Monitor at Pierre Van Cortlandt Middle School below. Lunch monitors work very hard and in often hot conditions.)
An outstanding question as we go to press is how many of the school workers will continue to hold out hope that their conditions of employment will improve, and that they will get the retroactive pay they will be owed in the new contract (which presumably will be backdated to July 1 when the new contract was supposed to have started.) Many workers had been hoping to have that money in time for the holidays, but it was not to be.
Sources tell us that the longer things drag on, the more likely it is that at least some workers will give up and look for other jobs. (Sources also say that process has already begun. Some school workers have been working for the district for more than 20 years.)
The Chronicle will report any updates as they occur.
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Thank you for the update. At this point, the school district is looking pretty shameful---but doesn't seem to care much.
Outrageous, but not surprising.
All one has to do is look at contracts for these positions in neighboring (or comparable) Districts to see that the norm is to have a salary schedule that runs from minimum wage up to $30 an hour with average rates falling in the 20s/hour. Each year the employee advances a step to usually get to the top pay in 15 years or so.
The two sides are so far apart, I guess this was inevitable. And the issue is that these types of salaries for this unit have never been budgeted for, which is why the District can’t budge.
This town is famous for asking for certain businesses while not supporting said unique businesses when they do open. Or having a holier than thou attitude and not supporting the “little guy” when needed, and that has been the biggest disappointment to me. The lack of empathy from school Admin, the lack of unity and leverage from the Teachers’ Union and the overall nonexistent support from town citizens.