With teachers walking picket lines, the atmosphere at the schools deteriorating, and Harvard voters facing a possible $1,000,000 override this spring, to say that parents of Harvard students are concerned is something of an understatement. However, some parents of school-aged children in Harvard have reacted to these challenges by getting together with like-minded parents and organizing to deal with the issues head-on.
One group, SOSHarvard, was recently formed to provide information about the schools’ fiscal crisis, and to lobby for this year’s override and for longer-term reform of education funding in the state. The other, as-yet-unnamed, group of concerned parents has a narrower focus, to help resolve the impasse over the current teacher contract negotiations, which it believes has reached the point of threatening the education of their children. Both groups want to bring together parents and other concerned residents to stop what they see as an erosion of the high quality of the schools.
These organizations have different functions than the Parent Teachers Association or the Harvard Schools Trust, which was formed in the late 1980s to raise money to supplement the regular school budget. While the parents in the PTA and the schools trust help beef up the schools’ quality through their fund-raising efforts, the founders of SOSHarvard see the shortage of money for the Harvard schools as a systemic problem, requiring a long-term political solution.
SOSHarvard has the short-term goal of rallying support for this year’s override, but it also sees the need for broad-based efforts to increase money for the Harvard schools from other sources. “Clearly, tax overrides alone are not an effective means to meet the requirements of excellent public education,” the group states on its website (SOSHarvard.org). “As the budget deficits widen, our Town officials’ endeavors to ameliorate the fiscal crisis result in increasingly disheartening events; the contract dispute between the Town and the teachers’ union is the most recent and visible symptom of a critically impaired system that compromises our children’s education. SOSHarvard believes in the power of citizen advocacy to effect positive change through public awareness, local forums, and state government lobbying.”
SOSHarvard has a website chock-full of information about how education is funded in the state, and how state funding has not kept pace with state education mandates. Indeed, Massachusetts spends less on education, as a percentage of state income, than the national average, the group notes. It seeks to educate residents on how Harvard’s average school spending per pupil is below the state average, and how state funding for the town has not kept pace with inflation over the last several years. The website, which was put together by member Stuart Sklar, has been up and running since early January.
It also lists upcoming meetings of town boards where school spending and the override will be discussed, and provides links for parents to email selectmen and town officials. In addition, the group has an email list of nearly 100 residents who receive updates from the organization on how to get involved in the budget discussions, and urges parents to lobby for adequate money for the schools and to support the override.
In an interview last week, Sklar said he became involved with the other SOSHarvard parents when he became concerned about the teachers’ actions over the stalled contract talks. He quickly realized the underlying problem behind the conflict was tight town finances. “Then I got upset with the low amount of state aid to the town, and all the state mandates,” he said. “The website is an easy, inexpensive way to reach people.”
The other group of concerned parents also came together last fall in reaction to the teachers working to rule and walking a picket line at the schools. “The picketing is what got me involved,” member Hilary Finnegan said at a recent meeting at member Holly Rothkopf’s house. “Seeing the teachers reduced to that made me sad...it’s hurting relationships—between the parents, the teachers, the school board.”
These parents were concerned that the teacher contract conflict was hurting their children’s education, and wanted to understand the issues behind the stalemate. Group members interviewed a number of town officials, workers, and teachers in an effort to understand the underlying problems. The six women and one man, all long-time Harvard residents, started with quite different ideas on the merits of the positions taken by the teachers and the school board, but eventually came to a consensus on how the two sides reached such an impasse, and how a possible settlement might be achieved. They now plan to lobby town officials and teachers in an effort to get the negotiations back on track.
The group argues that the School Committee has been unable to negotiate the contract in good faith because it feels so much pressure from other town boards to include a provision requiring teachers to move from a 10 percent cost share for health insurance to a 30 percent share over the course of the next contract. The group believes that the teachers would be willing to move to a 70/30 split eventually, but insisting that it be completed in one contract is unfair.
The parents argue that the other town employees, who moved to a 70/30 cost split two years ago, were forced to accept those terms too precipitously, and that such a share should have been negotiated over more than one contract with those other unions as well. They reject calls for teachers to accept similar terms, saying that two wrongs don’t make a right. Reaching such a cost split eventually for all town employees makes sense to the group, just not as quickly as the selectmen, school board, and Finance Committee are calling for.
A manifesto written by the group asks the teachers and school board to negotiate without a mediator, and to be flexible. The statement also notes that the negotiations have “become erroneously linked with the passage or lack of passage of the override.” The group asks the selectmen and finance board to educate the town on the importance of the override, and notes that the “teacher health care settlement should not, in actual dollars, influence the success or failure of its passage.” The amount of money saved by settling the contract with an 80/20 or a 70/30 split is “a small portion of a large override, which is desperately needed for many varied reasons…the questions really are how can we organize so as to afford our schools?”
This parent group will also be working to support the override, even as it is concerned that some town residents will have a hard time paying more to maintain school and town services. “The biggest problem is people with fixed incomes—we know they need to be protected, but the town does have a history of supporting the schools,” Rothkopf said.