Submit your contract ideas by Sept. 30
Posted: September 15, 2022
The Hawaii State Teachers Association is preparing to negotiate a new contract, and the Negotiations Committee needs your help determining priorities to be included at the bargaining table.
We’re asking members to please submit their ideas for contract changes and what you’d like the team to bargain for by Sept. 30.
The committee, made up of member volunteers, is hard at work reviewing educator input, including the results of a survey sent out earlier this year, and will discuss and make recommendations to the Negotiations Team as they begin compiling bargaining proposals to submit to the employer later this fall.
Members share their favorite contract inclusions, hopes for future contract
When asked what she loves about the current HSTA contract, Ashley Olson, a teacher at Lahainaluna High, said, “I love the fact that HSTA consistently fights for better pay and better working conditions. HSTA manages to take items that matter not just to teachers, but to the students and community, and segue them into a better contract for the teachers, but it also supports the rest of the education community.”
Cat Grace, a teacher at West Hawaiʻi Explorations Academy, said, “I appreciate the fact that HSTA is protecting our pension along with Social Security. I appreciate the fact that we can grieve with coverage and protection. I appreciate the fact that we have 21 PD (professional development) hours again, I appreciate the fact that we have shortage differential pay. There’s so much!”
Waiʻanae High teacher Ryan Tong said, “A really concrete thing for teachers is protecting your prep time, which admin tend to always want to take from us. By protecting teacher time, we’re actually ensuring that we also have people that come back to our profession.”
Members also spoke about areas they’d like to see HSTA address in our future contract.
Waiʻanae High teacher Lydia Saffery is looking for maternity leave to be included. “I would like to see actual maternity leave in the next contract, because the current contract takes maternity leave days out of our sick leave, so it doesn’t really feel like maternity leave if it’s coming out of your sick days,” she said.
Sarah Tochiki, Chiefess Kamakahelei Middle band director and HSTA Kauai Chapter president said, “What I’d like to see in our next contract is more strict language about our academic financial plan — that it has to be met by consensus among the faculty that it’s okay.”
McKinley High teacher Shaun Kamida expressed the need for more teacher prep time. “More prep time would be excellent,” he said. “I know a lot of teachers need that special time, because it’s not just teaching. It’s about preparing the right lessons, reviewing what we’ve done, and correcting work. That would definitely be a big, helpful thing for us teachers.”
Negotiating HSTA’s future contract
Other state employees negotiated extensions to their two-year contracts through June 30, 2025. The contract extensions included pay raises from July 2023 through June 2025. HSTA received a similar offer, but there was a catch. To secure those contract extensions, the other bargaining units sacrificed the ability to negotiate on any items, except health premium increases, through June 30, 2025.
This is a bargaining tactic the employer has used with HSTA since at least 2017 — a take-it-or-leave-it strategy where accepting pay increases precludes any further discussions and modifications on important topics.
Last spring, HSTA countered the state’s offer to extend our contract by two years with improvements including a lump sum payment, salary increases and step movements through June 2025, reopener language for health benefit payments for the last two years, and a letter of commitment from the interim superintendent to address non-cost items for the contract duration. Later in the spring, the employer rejected HSTA’s counteroffer and withdrew its proposal altogether.
Our current contract will expire June 30, 2023, with HSTA retaining the right to engage in meaningful negotiations on all contractual matters during the 2022–23 school year. In addition, HSTA has the advantage of knowing what all the other units settled for in the 2023–24 and 2024–25 school years. There will also be different parties at the negotiations table, including a newly elected governor after Dec. 5, potentially a new chief negotiator for the state, and a new permanent schools superintendent, Keith Hayashi.
Recent changes in the law also provide HSTA the opportunity to explore the possibility of modifying or restructuring the pay schedule to include added classifications beyond Class VII. That potential change was made possible after both the House and Senate unanimously passed Senate Bill 2819 and Gov. David Ige signed it into law this summer.
In addition, HSTA is currently working with the employer to finalize implementation plans to address salary compression for nearly 9,000 members via repricing, which is estimated to deliver more than twice as much money to HSTA’s bargaining unit members than what the state offered through an extension of the current contract, not counting tens of millions more for restored job-embedded professional development and continued shortage differentials.