HAYWARD – Teachers here made significant salary gains over what the school district was offering before their 10-day strike – gains that will help the district recruit and retain educators.
Members of the Hayward Education Association (HEA) voted 89 percent yes to ratify their salary agreement this afternoon, with 1,001 teachers voting, and 895 voting for the pact. They won 11 percent in raises over two years that will bump the top pay for experienced teachers to $88,000 by February 2008. In addition, teachers in the 20,000-student Hayward Unified School District will get a 1 percent off-the-salary-schedule payment no later than July 15 of this year.
Starting teacher pay will rise to $51,324 now, and to $52,863 by February 2008. The higher salaries will help to recruit new teachers and retain veteran educators in a district that has seen more than 500 teachers leave in the past three years due to low pay. Teachers must still pay all of their health insurance costs.
“This is a settlement to build on and it means that our strike made a difference in protecting the viability of this school district,” said Kathleen Crummey, president of the HEA union. “It shouldn’t have taken a strike to get this district to acknowledge that teachers here are underpaid. This is not a perfect settlement, but it’s a decent start.”
Both sides have dropped the idea of trying to launch a parcel tax campaign to fund raises for all district employees in 2008-09.
The strike clearly moved the district to provide more money to invest in teachers. Before the strike, the district was only offering teachers a 3 percent, one-time “bonus” for this school year.
The settlement gives educators an 8 percent raise effective April 2007. Educators will get another 3 percent raise starting on Feb. 1, 2008. Only salaries were up for negotiations. The current collective bargaining agreement expires on July 1, 2008, meaning both sides will be back in negotiations in the spring of that year.