MEDINA, Ohio – Medina City Schools Superintendent Aaron Sable updated Board of Education members on contract negotiations and preparations for a potential levy at their work session last night.
The administration and the Ohio Association of Public School Employees, which represents the district’s 300 non-teaching staff members, have been discussing a one-year contract extension for several months, Sable said.
Medina City Schools Superintendent Aaron SableAnn Norman, special to cleveland.com
The union has ratified the extension, which would allow for a 2 percent increase in pay for classified workers next school year, he said.
“It’s the same as what it has been in the course of the last three years,” Sable said.
Extending the contract by one year would put the union in a separate negotiation cycle from the district’s teachers and allow the classified staff to negotiate a new contract before the current emergency levy expires in December 2018, he said.
Sable is also in contract talks with the district’s school psychologists. A new state law has allowed them to unionize.
“It’s not something the district is necessarily in support of, because we view our psychologists as administrative positions,” he said.
In the past, the psychologists had received pay raises in line with other members of the administration.
But the eight psychologists decided that they wanted to form a union to negotiate a new contract, saying they felt there was disparity in their salaries compared with other districts in Medina County, he said.
The district is creating a contract “basically from scratch,” Sable said.
He said he expects the fledgling union to ratify a contract before the school board’s next meeting Feb. 21, when Sable will be asking the board to approve both new contracts.
He said he wanted to update the board at its work session ahead of time, so that the district could be “as open a book as we can.”
Board member Tom Cahalan said he appreciated the chance to talk about the contracts ahead of time.
“I like the fact that we’re doing this tonight,” he said, so that the community won’t be surprised in two weeks when the board is asked to vote on the contracts.
The school board also heard a report on the proposed 2017-18 contract with the Educational Services Center of Medina County, which provides some of the district’s direct instructional services, such as specialists and student aides, as well as work study programs, technical services and countywide programs such as the 24 math skills competition and the Fine Arts Festival.
The ESC helped the school board conduct its superintendent search last year.
The contract will be up for approval at the Feb. 21 board meeting. Last year, the district paid the ESC $724,000 for services rendered.
Will there be a levy in 2018?
Sable also noted that the administration is preparing for what comes next after the district’s current 5.9-mill, five-year emergency levy expires in December 2018. The levy brings in $6.6 million a year.
“We will need one or the other for sure. We need to make some decisions in the not-so-distant future about where we’re going with a potential levy,” Sable said.
The board could ask for a renewal of the current levy and keep services and programs the same, or it could ask for a new levy that would bring in additional money for increased programming, he said.
“We’re currently running very lean and responsibly,” he said.
As the district wraps up work on its strategic plan this spring, he said the administration should have a better idea of what the community expects and wants for the school district.
Sable said he plans to do a community survey in the fall to find out whether residents want additional programming in the schools and if so, would they support a levy.
He said the earliest date for putting a levy on the ballot would be the spring of 2018.
“The absolute latest would be the following fall to not have a gap in money collection,” he said.
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