Arbitrator gives OK to teachers' settlement

The arbitrator who helped the Clark County School District and its teacher's union settle their year-long salary negotiation made his final ruling Tuesday.

Three weeks ago, Oakland-based arbitrator Franklin Silver sent the two sides back to the bargaining table to make one last attempt at reaching a settlement on their own. The two sides quickly came to an agreement.

As expected, Silver accepted it, reading the ruling on a conference call Tuesday with district officials. He then sent the written ruling by express mail.

Terms of the deal had been announced in a news conference held by the Clark County Classroom Teachers Association last week: teachers will get a retroactive 4.25 percent salary increase for the 1997-98 school year, plus a .75 percent increase to insurance benefits, which automatically happens each year without negotiation.

Teachers will get a 3 percent increase for the coming school year, 1998-99. Of that, 1 percent will become part of the salary schedule if the 1999 Legislature funds it.

The district's approximately 11,000 teachers also got a one-time .25 percent payment that approximates the amount of interest teachers lost during the year-long negotiations.

Teachers will begin seeing bigger paychecks this month.

Now that the terms of teacher salary and benefits packages are official, the district's administrators and support staff unions can renegotiate the contracts they settled this year. A "me too" clause in their contracts allows them to approach the district if they believe another union got a better deal.

"We're going to be looking at the numbers," said Clark County Association of School Administrators executive director Allin Chandler. "If it looks like the teachers received more than we did, then it would be our intention to ask that negotiations be re-opened."

Education Support Employees Association executive director Fran Juhasz said, "We're going to bring our bargaining team back together and see what teachers received in light of the fact that we do have the option of reopening negotiations."

District officials are now turning their attention to settling contract negotiations with its fourth union, school police. School police have argued that they should eventually be paid as much as municipal police agencies.

"Right now, we're not even close to that, but we've gotten along fine and we expect to reach an agreement without going to arbitration," said Clark County School Police Sgt. Phil Gervase, school police union chief.

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