As Prince William County Public Schools get closer to passing a collective bargaining agreement, it’s clear how much it will cost taxpayers to allow teachers to wrangle over pay.
“It’s entirely reasonable to expect it will be seven figures,” said school division attorney Wade T. Anderson. Gainesville District School Board member Jennifer Wall pressed him for a a firm estimate, but he couldn’t provide it.
The county’s school division is Prince William’s largest employer, with more than 14,000 workers. On October 4, Anderson briefed the School Board on how the county’s anticipated million-dollar collective bargaining process would work at the county’s government school division.
Two bargaining units will be established within the local government school division. The first would be for licensed employees like teachers and school nurses, while the second would be for “everyone else,” said Anderson, including bus drivers and teacher assistants.
The school division will not allow supervisors, principals, assistant principals, substitute teachers, temporary employees, and those who have come out of retirement to continue working in schools to bargain for their pay.
On Wednesday, October 19, the School Board is expected to approve a resolution allowing collective bargaining, said At-large Board Chair Babur Lateef. If it does, it will usher in a landmark shift in how school employees negotiate pay and benefits.
Suppose employees choose to form a union and bargain. In that case, unions will replace the decades-old “meet and confer” process that allows department chiefs to meet with the school’s superintendent to share concerns about pay and benefits, usually semi-annually.
To form a union, at least 30% of eligible employees must show interest in doing so, and at least 50% of the employees who would be represented must participate in a secret-ballot election calling for unionization.
Anderson explained that of 7,000 eligible employees, at least 3,500 must participate in the secret-ballot election, and 1,571 would have to vote for unionization.
Once formed, employees could bargain over wages, benefits, and terms of employment. Subjects like retirement benefits, employee discipline, job qualifications, transfers, background checks, health and safety rules, and how the School Board conducts business will be off-limits.
Should employees have a problem, in most cases, they’ll be told to take it up with their union representation instead of their direct supervisor as they do today. Anderson said school administrators would not address topics already hashed out in a collective bargaining agreement.
If approved, the first collective bargaining negotiations will likely begin for the Fiscal Year 2025 budget, which begins July 1, 2024. That means bargaining would start in April 2023, said Anderson.
Democrats in the General Assembly brought back collective bargaining to the state in 2020. Public schools in Arlington and Richmond have already passed collective bargaining agreements.
State law continues to prohibit teachers from walking off the job in protest. The unions and the school division will have until October 1 to form an agreement or file an impasse.
If they can’t agree, they’ll have 30 days to call in a neutral mediator in hopes of striking a deal. The union and taxpayers would share the cost of the mediation.
Teachers don’t have to join a union or pay dues. However, if collective bargaining is established, the union must represent all employees, as non-union members will rely on the union to negotiate on their behalf.
Unions cannot compel or coerce employees to pay union dues. Unions must have written authorization to deduct union dues from employee paychecks.
Anderson said that employees could also reverse their decision to allow a union to take fees from their paychecks if they give the union 30 days’ written notice.
By law, the collective bargaining process cannot impede the School Board’s annual budget, which it approves each year in April.
Virginia School Boards cannot levy taxes and depend heavily on the city councils and Boards of Supervisors for funding. Prince William County automatically gives the government school division 57.23% of the county’s general fund revenues from county coffers each year.
Despite the likely passage of collective bargaining, the school division will continue to take its cues from the county government regarding what it can fund and how much.
“This is a nice start,” said Potomac District Supervisor Justin Wilk, a supporter of collective bargaining. “But inaction also has a cost. We should weigh the pros and cons of everything and ask how much it costs to lose a veteran teacher [to another school division] and how much have we spent on recruiting to fill vacant teacher positions?”
Coles District School Board member Lisa Zargapur said she’d researched other collective bargaining agreements between unions and government schools in other states. Prince William County’s final agreement could contain more than 200 pages of text. “It’s almost like an employee manual,” said Zargapur. “We have something now, a teacher contract that talks about how many days you work… it’s not very long. But this thing, what would explode [the current teacher contract].’
Gainesville School Board member Jennifer Wall has been skeptical about collective bargaining since the county’s teachers union, the Prince William Education Association, pushed for a collective bargaining resolution this spring.
“There is some narrative that collective bargaining is going to be the solution to the national teacher shortage, and I don’t think that is going to be the case because we have other states that allow collective bargaining, and we still have a national teacher shortage,” said Wall.
Lateef echoed Wall’s sentiment. He said that only more funding, not bargaining, would do the trick while chastising the Democrat slate of elected officials representing Prince William County in the General Assembly.
“Those folks are going to Richmond on behalf of us; if they want us to pay more for our teachers, which we want, we expect more from them. Whenever everyone else passes collective bargaining and [Prince William County Public Schools] is still one up from the bottom [in per-pupil spending in the Washington, D.C. region], we’ll see that collective bargaining didn’t solve anything,” said Lateef.
“I’ve heard from lawmakers on both sides that they gave a bunch of money to schools last year and that they’re done,” he added. “They’re not done.”
