Teachers and other professional employees in the Reading School District will start the coming school year with a new contract. The Reading School Board approved a five-year collective bargaining agreement Wednesday with the Reading Education Association.
All board members attending the meeting voted in favor of the contract. Board Vice President Leo Martinez did not attend the meeting.
The union represents the district’s more than 1,200 teachers, school counselors, social workers and nurses.
The approved contract will be in effect starting July 1 and run through June 20, 2028.
The contract calls for a 6.29% salary increase in the first year and successive increases of 5% for each of the following four years, he said.
Those covered under the agreement will have opportunities to earn additional income as they continue to earn credits, certifications or higher degrees through college courses, graduate programs and other educational opportunities.
“We are excited about this contract,” Dr. Jennifer Murray, district superintendent, said in a prepared statement. “We believe it acknowledges the sacrifices of our staff and the difficult nature of working in education today.
The agreement makes the district’s compensation competitive with other districts in Berks County, said Kristine Parkes, director of communications for the district.
For example, Parkes said, a newly hired teacher with a bachelor’s degree will earn $50,395, up from the current starting salary of $47,475.
By year three, she said, those same new hires will exceed the county average for third-year professionals with yearly step and column movement. Columns indicate how many educational units a teacher has accrued.
By the fifth year, Parkes added, the same class of new hires will become the third-highest paid in the county.
“This would be a 48.4% increase in their starting salary,” Parkes said in a written statement.
Other highlights of the agreement include holding employees’ contribution to health care premiums at the present rate for the length of the contract, new and annual increases in special education stipends and new and earlier longevity bonuses paid to professional employees.
Longevity bonuses will begin as early as the sixth year of consecutive service, the earliest in the county, Parkes said.
Jesse C. Leisawitz, chief legal officer for the district, said the agreement is the result of an early-bird negotiation process that was initiated last fall.
“As this board may be aware,” he said, “this is fairly unprecedented in our labor negotiation process.”
Negotiations were collegial and based on a mutual foundation of respect by both parties, Leisawitz said.
Through the process, he said, the district kept three priorities at the forefront: recruitment, retention and innovation.
Extending the stipend program to teacher of English as a second language is an example of the district’s innovation, he said.
Currently the stipend is offered to special education teachers, who are engaged in case management services, but not to ESL teachers.
“We wanted to change that,” Leisawitz said, “and we are proud to say that we’re the only district in the county to do that, if not the only district in the commonwealth.”
Leisawitz said the district is developing programming that can be used to design and deliver graduate-level coursework to provide opportunities for district professionals at no cost to them.
“We believe that this contract is really an investment in our future,” he said. “We know that there’s a nationwide teacher shortage and it’s impacting our district too.”
Fewer students are graduating from teacher preparation programs, he noted.
“But we hope that this agreement is the first step in correcting that,” Leisawitz said.
