The Education Association of Alachua County (ACEA) has declared an impasse in contract negotiations with Alachua County Public Schools (ACPS). Union representatives and teachers packed the school board’s regular meeting on Tuesday to tell the board the district’s proposed raise for the year is disrespectfully low.  

Though the union had asked originally for a 5% pay increase for employees and has since lowered that to 3.2%, ACPS’s negotiating team has refused to go higher than 1.6% over the course of 12 negotiation meetings since February, according to ACEA president Carmen Ward. 

The district has also refused to make any pay raise retroactive to the beginning of the teachers’ year, according to Ward, meaning that any work between July and when a contract is approved would not include the raise. Ward said ACPS has a long history of retroactively applying pay raises, and the refusal this year is “the really hostile part” of the negotiation. 

Ward said the district is calling it a 2.6% raise by including the annual step increase in the estimate, but employees are not eligible to begin receiving the step increase until they have worked for the district at least a year, and it does not reach 1% until a teacher has been with the district for nine years. 

For the newest, lowest-paid teachers, Ward said, this amounts to a raise of 24 cents per hour. 

“They just think they can unilaterally decide what the pay raise is,” Ward said in an interview. “Our last proposal was 3.2%. We’re only 1.6% apart, but our offer, our proposal, is double theirs because theirs is so low.” 

Faced with less than half the 3.5% pay increase they received last year, well below the inflation rate, teachers expressed more than just budgetary concerns at the rally before the meeting. 

They complained that they did not feel respected, calling the offered raise a “slap in the face” and airing grievances about when the administration has not listened to them. One teacher said she was told to throw out all her math manipulatives, only to make room for identical math manipulatives. 

About 200 out of 800 surveyed teachers have been assaulted by a student this year, according to Crystal Tessmann, ACEA’s Service Unit Director. Multiple teachers talked about how difficult the job is, and how none of them only work the 37.5 hours per week for which they are paid. 

Another teacher, who has now left teaching, said a lack of support from her administrator after she was discriminated against and verbally attacked by parents has prevented her from getting another job within the field of education. 

Other teachers said education professionals openly talk about finding other jobs outside the field. 

Tessman read a statement on behalf of an education support professional who said they had begun searching grocery store dumpsters for food. 

“There isn’t any profession I want to do more than teaching, but I won’t lose my house to keep doing it,” Danielle Engelhorn, a teacher at Parker Elementary School, told the board. 

After calling an impasse, Ward said she spoke to federal mediators, and those mediators will work with the district and ACEA to find a resolution. If the federal mediator cannot help the two parties to a resolution, the issue will go to a special magistrate, which can issue a ruling that both sides can choose to accept or not. 

Ward said that is the extent that Florida law allows for a union, but ACEA plans to do what it can within the limitations. Florida law prevents teachers from striking, which one teenage public commenter pointed out to the school board. 

“You are lucky that teachers cannot strike in Florida, because they would be walking out of each and every school building at this point,” student Oliver Flannigan told the school board, and several heads nodded.