2015-16 School Year Slated to End June 13 unless Agreement Reached with WEA; Board Votes on Jan. 20

District efforts to reach an agreement with the Warwick Education Association to start school one week earlier next year have reportedly fallen through, according to a statement released by the Warwick School District to the media this morning. The 2015-2016 school year is not set to end until mid-June according to the current proposed school calendar, which is scheduled to undergo a vote at the board meeting on January 20.

Under the proposed schedule, school would not start until September 9, with an end date of June 13. Warwick district officials had hoped to move the start of school to September 2, prior to Labor Day, but due to the collective bargaining agreement that is in place with district teachers, the district is not permitted to begin the school year before Labor Day.

According to the statement, “the administration approached the WEA leadership to proactively discuss an amendment to the CBA for the 2015/2016 school year only, by proposing starting school a week earlier in 2015-2016.”

“Being proactive, we looked at those concerns and we proposed to move the start date back to September 2 (before Labor Day). We approached the Association leadership to see if we could move the date back and have an MOU (memorandum of understanding) that addressed this issue,” said Superintendent Dr. April Hershey in the statement.

According to the statement, Warwick is the only district in the area that has a CBA that prevents the start of school prior to the early-September holiday.

“No other district in the county has this type of language in their contract. As with all other CBA language, we must abide by it,” said Hershey in the written statement.

This year, however, the holiday falls on the latest possible day, September 7, which prompted the district to make the request.

According to the statement released this morning, “The Board and administration were told that the executive leadership of WEA polled its members and felt they did not receive enough feedback to continue the discussions or bring it to the full membership for a vote.”

“We are disappointed in those folks… we thought we were partners looking at the best for our students,” said Board president Dr. Timothy Quinn in the written statement. “We are very disappointed that the leadership decided not to discuss it with the full complement of teachers and/or take it to the full membership for a vote.”Warwixksealsml2

The WEA president was unavailable for comment at press time. Efforts are underway by LititzDailyNews.com to reach WEA leadership for comment. This article will be updated if WEA officials respond.

WEA president Lisa Hochreiter provided a statement to LititzDailyNews.com and to other media this morning in response to the Warwick School District statement.  It reads:

“In response to the comments of the Warwick School Board, the Warwick Education Association leadership would like to respond:

“The WEA leadership (teachers union) was asked by the Warwick School Board in October 2014 to move the student start date for the 2015-2016 school year back to September 2, 2015, due to the later date of Labor Day. At that time, the WEA leadership polled their membership to determine if they wished to consider the request as an item of negotiation. The Warwick School Board, however, stated they were only concerned with our response and that there would be no negotiation of the terms of this change to the Collective Bargaining Agreement. Upon receiving the poll results, the WEA leaders determined that this was not an issue that the majority of members were interested in pursuing without the consideration of our non-economic concerns. After further discussion with the Warwick School Board, the WEA leaders voted a second time against taking this Collective Bargaining item to the membership for a vote due to the previous feedback from members. The WEA has made it clear that it would be happy to discuss this issue if the School Board would be willing to negotiate the terms of the contract change. Opening our mutually agreed upon Collective Bargaining Agreement in the middle of it’s duration to make changes solely at the request of the School Board, and for the benefit of one side only, is inappropriate and goes against the terms of a negotiated contract.

Another reason the WEA made the decision to remain status quo with the mutually agreed upon contract is the fact that Warwick School District has started after Labor Day for more than 32 years. In 8 of those 32 school years, Labor Day has fallen on a later date and no agreements were made to adjust the Collective Bargaining Agreement to move the school year start date before Labor Day. Our students and their families have planned vacations, jobs, and college responsibilities of older siblings in accordance with our later start date, which has been seen as a valuable asset. The winters of 1992 and 1996 were very severe, causing many school closures. As a result, many districts in the county switched their school calendars to commence before Labor Day. In these or subsequent years, our community has not made it known that an earlier start date would be preferred or this would have been considered as an item of negotiations in previous contracts.”

This story was updated at 11:11 a.m. We will update this story as more information becomes available.-Editor