SLIPPERY ROCK TWP — The 146 teachers in the Slippery Rock School District have a new contract.

The school board at a special meeting Monday unanimously voted to approve a three-year contract retroactively to July 1, 2013. It will expire June 30, 2016.

“Its terms are fair to both sides,” said school board President Polly Shaw in an e-mail. “We are satisfied with the new collective bargaining agreement.”

Jessica Schroeffel, president of the Slippery Rock Area Education Association, said that association members overwhelmingly approved the contract on July 31. With the school board’s vote, the contract is official.

The contract gives teachers no salary increase for the past school year, 3.75 percent for 2014-15 and 3.5 percent for 2015-16. The average salary for a teacher in the district is $58,989. It will be $61,201 in 2014-15 and $63,343 in 2015-16.

Teachers will pay $20 to $40 per month for health care, depending on whether they have single or family coverage. The in-network deductible will be $300 or $600.

Schroeffel said the teachers are taking on more of a shared risk with the health plan. If costs go up, she said the union will work to modify the plan.

She said that the union and the district think the contract is fiscally responsible and helpful for both sides.

“We’re aware of the economics of the world that’s going on around us,” Schroeffel said.

The previous three-year contract expired June 30, 2013. Teachers worked without a contract for more than a year.

Schroeffel said that the proposed pay freeze in the first year of the contract slowed negotiations down. Besides that, she said the negotiations were smooth from both ends.

“This was a very amiable process,” Schroeffel said.

Shaw said the extra time went to cleaning up contract language for clarity and to reflect current practices, as well as to carefully work on salaries and benefits.

The previous contract gave average pay increases of 4.2 percent in the first year and 4 percent in the second and third years. The health care premiums were the same as this contract, but the deductibles were $125 or $250.

Before the previous contract, teachers worked with an expired contract for one year before settling on a new, 5-year contract in 2006. A state fact-finder helped the two sides settle the contract.

That contract, which covered 2005 to 2010, gave an average 3.75 percent pay raise in each of the first three years of the contract and 3.5 percent in the final two. It was also the first time district teachers shared the cost of medical insurance premiums.

Slippery Rock is not the only district in Butler County to work on teacher contracts recently.

In December, the Mars School District approved a three-year contract that will expire June 30, 2017.

In September, the Butler School District and the Butler Education Association reopened its contract to discuss wages for the 2014-15 school year, which is the final year of its contract.

In May 2013, the Karns City School District and the Karns City Education Association agreed on a 5-year contract, effective in 2014.