May 18, 2016 3 min read

WAYNESBURG – Central Greene’s teachers and its school board appear to be far apart when it comes to contract negotiations that picked up again earlier this month.

The district’s teachers showed their dissatisfaction by arriving en masse at Tuesday’s school board meeting, which attracted hundreds of people and was moved to Margaret Bell Miller Middle School’s auditorium to accommodate the crowd.

Melissa Wilson, president of Central Greene Education Association, said no progress was made at the May 4 meeting that restarted negotiations. She said the board made the teachers an offer, but it included pay freezes for the 2016-17 school year.

The union has been working without a contract since the previous five-year deal expired in August.

“If we would accept their ‘offer’ that they presented to us on May 4 at the table, our most experienced teachers will have gone without a raise for 2 years,” she wrote in an email. “We want a contract that provides equity for our most experienced teachers. We want a fair and equitable contract.”

School Board President Andrew Corfont confirmed Wednesday the district made an offer May 4, but the union hasn’t formally responded to it. When asked about pay freezes, Corfont declined to comment about details of the proposal.

Wilson also declined to disclose other details about negotiations, including terms of the tentative agreement reached in February by bargaining representatives from both sides, but rejected in a 7-2 vote by the school board in March. The union, whose 165 members have been working without a contract since August, tentatively approved the agreement.

Wilson said the union is upset that tentative agreement is now off the table.

“They want us to act like that never happened and start from scratch,” she said. “That’s not negotiating in good faith and we have been negotiating in good faith. They’re saying, ‘We messed up so we want a redo,’ and that’s unheard of in the world of negotiating.”

“How can you throw away 16 months of negotiations just because you didn’t have faith in the people you appointed?”

The school board made changes to the bargaining team in the past few weeks.

It added two more members to its side of the bargaining committee – Corfont and Kevin Barnhart – and removed Superintendent Brian Uplinger from the role of chief negotiator, although he is still on the bargaining team. The board also brought in William Andrews, a third party labor attorney from Pittsburgh, to help with negotiations.

Wilson said the board told the union the tentative agreement was rejected because the district is broke, but she said the teachers shouldn’t have to “balance their budget and their fiscal responsibility on our backs.”

Corfont agreed money was a problem and the reason the tentative agreement was rejected. He blamed the closure of Emerald Mine in November as a reason for the significant revenue loss.

“We are $3.4 million short from Alpha,” he said. “It is not easy to make up that amount of money through tax revenue. Right now, we’re trying to come up with $3.4 million to finish out the year and go into next year.”

Central Greene is still expecting to collect that $3.4 million in 2015 taxes from Alpha, but at a later date. However, the district could lose close to $260,000 in taxes during the 2016-17 school year because of the closure of the mine, and even more the following year, school officials said.