The South Butler School District and South Butler County Education Association are still negotiating a new teachers’ contract without much progress.

The two organizations came to an agreement on teacher transfers, but remain at a stalemate on matters including health care, salaries and open houses.

Both sides insist that they are the ones willing to negotiate, while the other remains stubborn.

School board solicitor Tom Breth released what he called a “tentative agreement” with the SBCEA, and said the district is waiting for the SBCEA to sign off on it.

“It’s something the board would sign off on,” Breth said. “If the teachers suggest they’ll agree to this, the board will agree to it. But we can’t get them to agree to it.”

Brooke Witt, Pennsylvania State Education Association representative, said the document the district is calling a tentative agreement is a “counter proposal.” She also said the SBCEA has been the one willing to make concessions, not the district.

“I don’t believe that they’ve made a single concession throughout this negotiation,” she said. “We as the association are willing to go to a health-care plan that will have more costs than the current plan. That’s a concession by the association. The association has also moved significantly under their salary proposal while the district has continually gone backward.”

The district proposed two health care plans to the SBCEA at a negotiation meeting this month.

One was a consumer driven plan with a $2,000 individual deductible and $4,000 family deductible.

Under this plan, the district would be responsible for 50 percent of the out-of-pocket costs before the deductible was reached.

Another was a qualified high deductible plan that Breth said the SBCEA had asked for. It contains a health savings account and a $1,300 individual deductible and $2,600 family deductible.

It also contains no monthly premium contributions from the teachers.

“That was a big concession on the board’s part,” Breth said.

The first year, the district would contribute $390 to the health savings account of an individual plan and $780 to the account of a family plan. These amounts would decrease by $120 each year for the proposed five years of the contract.

Witt said the SBCEA would need more money from the district into the health savings accounts for the teachers to agree with the proposal.

“We want more money into the health savings account to curb the costs (of health care), because this is a big change from what (teachers) have now,” Witt said.

The SBCEA also is against the consumer driven plan.

“There’s really no good reason to include it at this point,” Witt said. “The (qualified high deductible) plan that we’ve designed is superior.”

Both sides also differ on the matter of salaries. The SBCEA wants a six-year agreement from 2014, when the last contract expired, to 2020.

The salary would retroactively increase by 3.75 percent for the 2015-16 school year, 3.85 percent for 2016-17, 4 percent for 2017-18, 3.95 percent for 2018-19 and 3.95 percent for 2019-20 to raise the average teacher salary from $56,745 to $70,543.

The district is proposing to retroactively pay teachers $500 for 2014-15, 2015-16 and 2016-17, and then raise the teachers’ salary by 9.75 percent in 2017-18 and 3 percent in 2018-19. This would raise the average teacher salary to $64,129.

“The board believes that their wage proposal is a reasonable wage proposal based upon the financial constraints facing the school district,” Breth said.

Witt outlined her issues with the district’s proposal.

“For three of those four years (teachers) don’t get any credit for their service, they don’t get any payment in the form of raises added to their salary,” she said. “And in that fourth year there they would get a big bump. But basically they worked for three years with the district proposing a $500 bonus for those people.”

Open houses for parents was another point of contention. The district is proposing that all teachers participate in their building’s open house programs, and if they are assigned to more than one building, they must participate in the open house program for each assigned building. They would be entitled to three hours of compensation for participating in the extra open houses.

“The board said, ‘We’ll pay you to go do that, we’ll pay you for your time,’ and they still won’t agree to it,” Breth said. “That’s a big issue because it’s an important educational issue.”

Witt said the SBCEA is writing a counter proposal for the next negotiation meeting.

“We have offered at one point that would be an optional thing, depending on how many people are assigned,” Witt said. “Some of them do cover multiple open houses anyways, so we have proposed alternatives to their proposal which had been rejected, so the last position was to keep the (expired contract’s) language the same.”

The two sides agreed upon teacher transfers, specifically that school administration will “first consider volunteers, then the least senior teacher, before deciding to involuntarily transfer a teacher. However, the ultimate decision to involuntarily transfer a teacher will be made at the administration’s sole discretion.”

“(The district) felt the administration has to have the ability to assign teachers in an educationally beneficial manner so the compromise was the language that we came up with,” Breth said.

Witt also commented on the matter.

“This is a way to help control who is moved around to help fill the holes as more and more teachers are moved to different positions,” she said. “This gives the district the requirement to ask for volunteers before they just move somebody.”

The school board and SBCEA will meet again in March to negotiate terms for the contract. The South Butler School District is currently in its third year without a new contract.