The New Hyde Park-Garden City Park school district has officially reached an impasse in its contract negotiations with the school nurses’ union, a lawyer for the district announced Monday night.
The attorney, Sharon Berlin, told the school board that the district recently filed a declaration of impasse in the talks with the nurses and had a mediator appointed on Oct. 2.
No meetings with the mediator have been scheduled yet, Berlin said.
“We’re hopeful that having a mediator involved at this point will help the parties resolve the impasse that we have reached and that the mediators will be able to help us reach a mutually acceptable agreement,”she said in an interview Tuesday.
Mediators are appointed and paid for by the state to help broker agreements in collective bargaining talks like these, Berlin said.
The main points of contention between the school district and the nurses, she said, are salaries, health insurance and other “terms and conditions of employment.”
The nurses, along with the district’s custodians, have been working under the terms of an expired contract since 2013. Clerical workers in the district have not had a new contract since 2011.
Berlin said the district’s goal in the talks is to make its labor costs “a little bit more manageable,” given how the state-mandated tax levy cap limits its revenue growth.
The unions, on the other hand, are seeking a “fair” salary increase and to keep its health insurance premiums where they are, said Stephanie Teff, an organizer with the Civil Service Employees Association.
Teff said the clerical workers are still in mediated talks with the district, which they started two years ago. And the custodians did not make much progress when they went through mediation, union leader Michael Coppola said.
Stephanie Cascio, a Hillside Grade School nurse and the nurses’ union’s leader in the negotiations, said she is “hopefully optimistic” about starting mediated talks with the district.
“You have to be,” she said. “Otherwise you get yourself discouraged.”
Negotiations with the custodians and clerical workers have also encountered delays.
The custodians’ union recently rescheduled a Sept. 28 meeting with the district for Oct. 27.
School officials have not met with the clerical workers since December 2014, Berlin said, and the union refuses to go any further with the talks as long as the board keeps an increase in health insurance premiums on the table.
The meetings have been delayed, Teff said, because the workers feel no progress has been made in the negotiations.
“They deserve to have a contract, and if we’re not speaking it’s tough to reach an agreement if there’s no meeting set up and no dialogue,” Berlin said Monday night.
During the public comment period of Monday’s school board meeting, Teff asked the board to send a representative to sit in on the talks.
“They (the workers) are here for you, and they know what their priority is,” she said. “I’m asking you to be here for them and to get involved in this, because we truly are at a standstill.”
Berlin said her request is founded on the “incorrect assumption” that the school board does not know what is going on in the talks. In reality, she said, the board is updated regularly and works with the district to decide who sits at the table during negotiations.
District Superintendent Robert Katulak and school board President Ernest Gentile said the negotiations could only be discussed privately. None of the school trustees responded to Teff’s request during the meeting.
While she is aware that the board members get the district’s perspective of the talks, Teff said, she wants them to hear the negotiations first-hand, particularly since they have been going on for so long.
“When I see a situation like that, I think the people who run the show have to take a hand, because it’s not getting done by the people who are sitting at the table,” she said.
