“This was like a prayer,” said Jody Barksdale, a sixth-grade math and reading teacher at Rowland School on Derry Street, and a vice-president of the Harrisburg Education Association, the local teachers’ union. “This was like God was dropping this in our laps, saying, ‘You do have a leg to stand on.’ ”
Barksdale was referring to the discovery, last week, that the school board had neglected to ratify the cut in pay and benefits that local teachers had agreed to, after months of negotiation, in early August last year. The cuts were a key component of the recovery plan for Harrisburg’s public schools, drafted in the spring under the auspices of Act 141, the 2012 Pennsylvania law providing for state oversight and assistance in financially distressed districts. For a while, the idea that the teachers would embrace the plan seemed doubtful—they had already endured school closures, furloughs, and a three-year pay freeze. Yet the district’s financial outlook was grim, with a projected shortfall of $131 million by 2018. On August 6, the teachers voted overwhelmingly to accept the cuts as outlined in the plan.
“I talked myself into thinking it was the right thing to do,” Barksdale said. It was Friday afternoon, and she was sitting at a long table in an assembly hall in Steelton, handing out ballots to teachers as they arrived from the schools. Barksdale, who has taught in the district for 15 years, is earning less than she did four years ago. She and her partner, another district teacher, expected a loss of $1,000 per month in household income under the proposed cuts. But she voted for them anyway. “I personally didn’t feel that it was fair to the retirees who would have to lose their benefits, and things they’d worked their entire careers for,” she said. She also feared what would happen to the district if the teachers rejected the plan. “If we didn’t agree to this, they were threatening to charter up our district and dismember it.”
Less than two months later, the teachers learned that the recovery plan’s projections of imminent budgetary shortfalls—upon which the need for union concessions was predicated—were overblown. In October, the district’s new financial officer, Peggy Morningstar, reported to the school board that, in place of a $4.5 million deficit for the 2012-2013 school year, the district actually faced a surplus of around $11 million.
On October 14, at a school board meeting in the auditorium of John Harris High School, teachers took to the microphone to demand an explanation. Gene Veno, the district’s state-appointed recovery officer, pledged to make adjustments to his plan, which he acknowledged had been based on incorrect data. But when it came to the restoration of the salary cut, he was circumspect. He maintained, at that meeting and subsequent ones, that any update to the plan must consider the full range of recovery objectives: not only a fair wage for teachers, but also academic improvement, minimal tax increases, and long-term fiscal stability. The union interpreted his hedging to mean that the cuts would remain as negotiated—an outcome they resented, but one they had little power to alter, since they’d voted to approve their contract back in August.
Then came last week’s peculiar discovery. On Monday, January 20, union leadership noticed that the school’s board agenda included a vote on their labor contract scheduled for Tuesday afternoon—nearly six months after the contract had been negotiated. The school board had apparently never ratified it. “We saw an opportunity,” Sherri Magnuson, the union president, said. After a snowstorm postponed the board’s meeting to Friday, the union hastily assembled the vote in Steelton for the same afternoon. By the time the ballot closed, at 5:30 p.m., 79 percent of the membership had voted; an hour later, Magnuson announced the results before the board. By a unanimous vote, 389-0, the teachers had rescinded the agreement from August.
When Magnuson made her announcement, the teachers, assembled in their blue union T-shirts in the chairs behind her, broke into applause. But the folks on the other side of the microphone were not so easily moved. Veno, who had declined to speculate on the consequence of a vote to rescind (“That’s an administrative matter, I have no comment”), was preparing to deliver a PowerPoint on his amended recovery plan. It would include a restoration of half the 5-percent cut to this year’s salaries, along with the “opportunity for full restoration in the future along with potential salary increases,” depending on the district’s future performance.
The school board, for its part, proceeded as if the union vote had never occurred. By a bare majority—five in favor, with two ‘no’ votes and one abstention—it ratified the old contract (among a bundle of other contracts) and pressed on through the meeting. This was, in part, a way of covering for an embarrassing neglect of procedure. Jennifer Smallwood, the school board president, had signed the labor agreement in August, but had never brought it to the board for a majority vote, as required by board policy. “From my understanding, ‘ratified’ means signed by all parties,” Smallwood said after the meeting. “ ‘Ratify’ means to approve.” (When it was pointed out that “ratification” was the word describing the vote on the evening’s agenda, Smallwood replied, “Then that’s the word on the agenda.”)
But the board’s decision might also have been a reflection of caution in the wake of such dubious accounting. James Thompson, who chairs the board’s budget and finance committee, said that the discovery of the surplus last fall only shows how poor the district’s budgeting models are. “I would be cautious even about the projection of a surplus,” he said. He voted to keep the contract as negotiated because, he said, “last year is last year.”
From the outset, Veno, the recovery officer, has been tasked with an essentially impossible mission: he must somehow deliver better academic results while employing fewer resources. Parts of his plan reflect that assignment’s absurd circularity, such as the endeavor to improve district finances by winning students back from charter schools—a result dependent on improving district academics, which is dependent on improved district finances. For that burden to be compounded by procedural errors, on matters that were meant to be settled at the start of the school year, must be profoundly frustrating.
But teachers also face impossible expectations. Barksdale works three jobs; her partner works two. When the pay cut was adopted, she said, “we literally had to sit down and re-budget, and hope and pray we didn’t have to sell our house.” Yet, when stories about the district appear online, they are greeted with invective commentary about “union parasites” and “whining.” When the teachers agreed to accept the cuts, they did so on the basis of a projection that has turned out to be a fiction. The board’s botched ratification might be a technicality—but then, technicalities are what we resort to when we can’t depend on good faith.
Correction: An earlier version of this article referred to James Thompson, a school board member, as the board’s “budget and finance director.” Thompson is the board’s budget and finance committee chair.
