The Herricks School District and its faculty have officially signed a memorandum of agreement for a new teacher contract and the Herricks Teachers’ Association must now vote on the new contract followed by a vote by the school board’s trustees to ratify a new contract, Board President Juleigh Chin said last Thursday.
“We’ve moved one step forward,” Chin said. “We have received, very recently, the first signed [memorandum of agreement] back from the negotiation committee. We are now just waiting for the HTA to actually vote on it.”
HTA President Nidya Degliomini said in an interview that now members of the HTA must vote on the new contract in a “secret ballot” vote. The vote will follow a general member meeting on Tuesday, and individual meetings at each school in the district. She said the secret ballot vote will take place at the end of next week.
Herricks faculty have been operating without a new labor contract since June 2018, Degliomini said.
For the contract to be ratified 51 percent of the union has to vote in favor of the new contract, Degliomini said. Only the executive council for the union and a representative from each school from the district have seen the contract, she said. HTA members do not see the contracts until the meetings, Degliomini said.
On whether the vote will pass, Degliomini said, “the determination is really the members.”
“I think it has a good chance,’ Degliomini said of the HTA vote.
She said that if the agreement is ratified, she expects the Herricks board to vote in favor of the agreement as well and announce the vote at the Oct. 24 meeting.
Superintendent Fino Celano said at a previous board meeting that he and the other board members were “optimistic” after a Sept. 11 “tentative settlement” and Chin and trustee James Gournaris said to parents concerned with the settlement falling through to keep the “eye on the prize.
