FREEPORT — Nearly three years after the formation of Regional School Unit 5 — serving Freeport, Durham and Pownal — officials are still trying to iron out a unified teacher contract.

Hank Ogilby, a Freeport High School social studies teacher and chief negotiator for the teachers’ union, said not having a unified contract for teachers throughout the district means that teachers in each town are still working on different pay scales.

For teachers throughout the district, Ogilby said, “there are the same expectations and mandates, but the salaries and benefits are different.”

In district-wide committees where teachers from each school work together, Ogilby said that can create tension.

“Some know that they’re being paid differently and that creates some resentment,” Ogilby said. “We want people to feel good about working together.”

As a part of the consolidation law passed by the Legislature in 2008, school districts are required to consolidate employee contracts, but that requirement “has no real teeth,” Ogilby said. Nelson Larkins, chairman of the RSU 5 board and member of the district’s negotiating team, said that process has been completed for staff and administrators, but finding a contract to suit 180 educators has posed more challenges.

“It was a bigger task than any of us realized, bringing together the history of the schools and contracts dating back to the 1970s and having to go line by line,” Larkins said. “In the case of the old Freeport contract, there were closed to 40 articles.”

On the issue of pay, Larkins said the RSU is looking to “level-up” the pay of educators “ where, generally, the Pownal and Durham teachers made less than the Freeport teachers.”

Ogilby said that Freeport schools employ about 70 percent of the RSU’s teachers.

Parties on both sides of the table said negotiations are moving closer to resolution but the finish line isn’t quite in sight. Neither Ogilby or Larkins felt they could provide an accurate estimate of when negotiations would be complete or the specifics of what remains to be resolved.

Through the current negotiations, Larkins said, tentative agreements have emerged on certain issues and others, he said, are gaining ground.

“A lot of pieces have fallen into place in my mind and I don’t think the parties are real far apart on points that are still left to be negotiated,” Larkins said. “We’ve had a lot of really good talks recently and once we get past the school break, (we) will have a series of nights set up again.”

Earlier this month, Ogilby said negotiators had met twice a week in all-day sessions to get down to “a few critical points.”

Generally, Ogilby said that early challenges came from different perspectives on where the negotiation process should start.

“We felt we would continue our current contracts,” Ogilby said. “ They thought we could start from scratch and we felt there was some history there.”

Recently, Ogilby said that “both sides have been working hard,” but that the yearslong process has made some teachers “feel worn down and not supported.”

“It’s hard to rise above that, but we pride ourselves on being able to separate our work in the classroom from how we feel we’re being treated as professionals,” Ogilby said.

Before ironing out the teacher contract issue, Ogilby said, there were many challenges the RSU had to overcome in the process of consolidation.

Ogilby said that teachers were willing to put the contract issue on the back burner early on in the consolidation process.

“But those early struggles are past and we have to settle this part of consolidation,” Ogilby said.

At a Feb. 8 RSU 5 board meeting, according to meeting minutes, Superintendent Shannon Welsh reported another possible challenge for RSU 5’s consolidation: Durham residents submitted a petition to put an item on the town’s April town meeting warrant allocating $25,000 for the formation of a committee to begin evaluating the town’s possible withdrawal from the RSU.

If the town should vote to form that committee, the group would begin evaluating the details of such a move and the ultimate decision to withdraw would have to gain support of two-thirds of the town’s voters.

Speaking about consolidation generally and not the Durham petition, Ogilby said, “We’re still a young district — who knows how it will play out.” 

dfishell@timesrecord.com