School Comm. Approves Secretary Unit Contract

By Adam Swift

The School Committee approved a new three-year contract with the Winthrop Teachers Association’s secretarial unit at its meeting on Monday.

The contract includes a 2 percent pay increase per year, as well as a number of increases in longevity pay and stipends for work that typically takes extra work hours.

“There were some language changes kind of cleaning up old language of the contract that needed to be renewed a little bit, such as the employee rosters and providing that information to the committee in a timely fashion,” said Superintendent of Schools Lisa Howard. “One item that is a new benefit is the holiday of Juneteenth, which is a federal holiday they are entitled to.”

Longevity adjustments were another aspect of the contract that was adjusted, Howard said, with additional $50 for step 10, 15, and 20 years in each of the three years of the contract. 

Once a secretary has been with the schools for 25 years, their longevity pay will increase from $1,600 to $2,000.

A number of stipends, paid to either a single secretary at each school or divided among them, were also increased.

“The graduation stipend for Winthrop High School was in there at $1,000, and we’ve increased that to $2,600,” said Howard. “At the discretion of the principal that may be divided between multiple secretaries who are doing that work above and beyond the school day for graduation.”

Similarly, the stipend for working on the Moving On ceremony at the middle school was increased from $750 to $1,000.

“A new benefit in the collective bargaining agreement revolves around student registration,” the superintendent said. “The secretaries have taken on building registration, which is a change from the way registration used to be conducted when we had a single parent liaison doing the majority of that work.”

There will now be a $1,000 stipend per building to be decided by the principal. There will also be a $500 per building stipend for those schools where residency needs to be reestablished at grades three, six, and nine.

“We also added a stipend that has been given for years but not recognized in the collective bargaining agreement, and that was the Medicaid stipend, which is $1,600,” said Howard. “It has been budgeted and paid in the past through a grant, but moving it into the collective bargaining agreement allows for retirement benefits to be taken from that.”

In addition to the two percent year salary increases, there will also be a minor market adjustment of $500 for steps one through seven in the current school year, and an adjustment of $700 for step eight.

In other business, Howard discussed the state’s recent decision to allow a 14 percent increase in private school tuition next year and how it will impact the Winthrop budget for out-of-district special education costs.

“It’s the largest increase in tuition for private special education schools in the Commonwealth in many, many years, and I can tell you that the superintendent group, as well at the PPS (pupil personnel services) directors group, has been extremely vocal with the state of Massachusetts about the shock of that sticker price,” said Howard. 

Howard said the impact is going to fall primarily on smaller school districts, such as Wintrhop, as opposed to big city districts.

“A 14 percent increase on our total out of district tuition, separate from collaboratives, is going to be somewhat of a sticker shock, but we are preparing for that with our budget and the use of circuit breaker money in the future,” said Howard.

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