Contract details must be ratified

Following a 12-hour negotiating session that ended at 3:30 a.m. Friday, the Corvallis School District and the union representing its teachers have come to a tentative contract agreement.

However, details of the agreement will not be announced until the information has been shared with members of the Corvallis Education Association, which includes about 400 teachers, including 80 new teachers hired this summer.

“The next steps involve the school board reviewing the tentative agreement and the CEA taking it to their membership,” said Corvallis School District spokeswoman Jeanne Holmes.

Though negotiations had been under way since February, neither side in the negotiations cited major points of contention, and talks mostly focused on salary, raises and benefits.

The previous agreement expired in June.

“We’re just very excited to be able to start a school year having reached a successful agreement,” said teachers’ union president Eneke Warnke. “It feels good.”

The school district and the teachers union had temporarily halted contract talks in June, then picked up again last week.

At that time, the teachers were asking for a 4 percent cost of living raise during each of the first two years of the new contract and a 3.75 percent raise during the contract’s third year.

The school district was offering a 2.1 percent cost of living raise the first year, with raises of up to 3 percent tied to the Consumer Price Index during the second and third years of the contract.

The union was asking that raises based on experience amount to a

4 percent pay increase, while the school district was offering 3.75 percent.

Both sides were also focusing on medical benefits, including the cost of enrolling teachers in a new statewide health insurance pool that will go into effect in October 2008.

It is uncertain how the change will affect health premiums, but the current provider of medical benefits predicted a 15.7 percent increase for the 2007-08 school year.

The teachers union was asking the school district to pay up to

10 percent of the premium increase each year for three years.

The school district was offering to pay up to 10 percent the first year, but was offering no help with any premium increase the second year and was offering to pay up to 5.5 percent of the premium increase the third year.