NORTHAMPTON — At a School Committee meeting Thursday evening at JFK Middle School, members were expected to vote on a tentative agreement with the Northampton Association of School Employees (NASE), the union that represents school employees, but the committee voted to delay the vote due to a clerical issue in the contract that they want to be clarified. Last week, city and school union representatives reached a tentative agreement on three-year contracts covering all unionized school employees after six months of negotiations.
School Committee member R. Downey Meyer told the group there was a clerical error causing ambiguity. He referred to a missing letter.
“It’s potentially something if you ratify and then the parties disagree, well, then, you’ve ratified something with ambiguity,” Meyer said at the meeting. “When you ratify something with ambiguity, it’s read against you.”
He could not say in detail what exactly the error was — the committee and NASE are limiting what they say about the agreement publicly — so the committee went into executive session, a closed-door meeting, to discuss it. When the group came back, they quickly voted unanimously to postpone the ratification vote for a special meeting the following week.
“We will be in immediate communication to try to resolve what we believe is a scrivener’s error,” said Mayor David Narkewicz, adding that they plan to hold a special meeting next week “so we can get the ratification complete.”
“I think the most important thing is that I don’t want this to be seen as something that we thought up as a way to slow down the deal,” Meyer told the Gazette Friday morning. He said the issue is not about the substance of the tentative agreement.
Some of the contract’s details, which school and union officials declined to provide last week, were revealed at the meeting.
Both the teachers’ contract and the cafeteria workers’ agreement include a 3 percent raise every year for the next three years, Superintendent John Provost said at the meeting. NASE has been advocating for an increase in teacher pay for months.
Educational support professionals will receive a 4 percent raise the first year and a 3 percent raise in both of the following two years. Administrators will receive a 2 percent raise the first two years and then a 2.5 percent increase. Pay scales for custodians and clerical staff will be made consistent with the pay scale for similar positions in the city, according to Provost.
In addition, “All gender binary language is removed from the CBAs,” Provost said, referring to the collective bargaining agreements.
NASE President Sadie Cora said that the date for the union’s ratification vote is not yet confirmed but that the vote will likely happen on Aug. 26.
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com.