Negotiations with Portland Adult Education union headed for mediation

Yahoo

31-03-2025

Mar. 31—A new union representing Portland Adult Education's part-time teachers is about to enter mediation with the school district after many months of meeting without reaching an agreement on their first contract.
Although negotiations have been productive, union members are frustrated with the district's recent decision to bring in a mediator, which they're concerned will delay progress. The administration said the choice is designed to move the negotiations forward. Neither party shared specific points of disagreement in the negotiations.
Portland Adult Education is the district's largest school by enrollment, and serves about 2,000 students. Its courses in English for Speakers of Other Languages, or ESOL, are in high demand, with more than a thousand on waitlists to take courses.
Among the school's teaching staff, 18 are full-time employees represented by the district's teacher union who receive a salary and benefits, but the majority of teachers, 31, are part-time adjuncts who teach up to 20 hours a week and are paid hourly ($26.78 an hour). Portland Superintendent Ryan Scallon said the district also pays for planning time.
At a school board meeting this month, Portland Adult Ed part-time teacher Lucy Shulman expressed frustration with the latest development in the negotiation process.
"Our team was really surprised to hear that the school board chose to pull the plug on negotiations and file for mediation, rather than make a good-faith attempt to collaborate," Shulman said. "We thought that members of a board that affirm their commitment to equity so often and so publicly would immediately see the problem with a two-caste system of compensation among the teachers at Adult Education."
Scallon said it's common for a first contract, where both parties are starting from scratch, to take longer than a renewal.
UNION FORMATION
Vanessa Sylvester, a part-time ESOL teacher at Portland Adult Ed, said the idea for the union rose out of a 2023 district study about hourly compensation.
"Out of that study, which found that our pay rate was not as high as it should be, we got together and talked about organizing a union so we can be able to address the issues of compensation," she said. "With overwhelming support, we went ahead and organized."
The Portland Adult Education members said they are organized by the Portland Education Association, but are negotiating a separate contract. The president of the Portland Education Association did not respond to a request for comment.
The new union of hourly workers officially achieved certification in February of 2024 and began bargaining with the district that summer.
Sylvester and Scallon agreed there has been progress, but Scallon said that there are a lot of different interests among the bargaining group, which have extended the timing of the negotiations.
Recently, Scallon said, the district decided to call in a mediator, a neutral party from the Maine Labor Relations Board that either group in a collective bargaining negotiation can request.
"We felt like a mediator at this stage could help us, as a collective, move forward in this process," he said. "And so I think everybody has been engaged in it so far in good faith ... We didn't want to get stuck, or remain stuck."
Sylvester said she is worried not just about the delay, but also the cost to the district.
"Our interest is to better serve our students, and we should be able to figure that out together," she said.
Going forward, Scallon said, the two parties will have to agree on a mediator and then schedule a meeting, or series of meetings. There is no specific timeline in which the negotiations need to be completed — the union members say a contract feels overdue, while Scallon said the goal is to reach an agreement that will stand the test of time, and to do that sooner rather than later.
The district is right in the middle of its budget season, but Scallon said once the negotiations are done, the district can make adjustments to the budget as needed.
SUSTAINABLE WORK
Union organizers agree that there are different reasons they're negotiating, from higher pay to benefits to retirement benefits to schedules. But overall, Shulman said: "We'd like this to be more sustainable work."
Both Shulman and Sylvester would like to make Portland Adult Ed their full-time job, and say a goal of negotiations is creating an on-ramp for hourly employees to do that.
"We're all coming to this job from different places, and we're all here 100% for the students. Some people are in retirement, or semi-retirement, and teach a class," Sylvester said. "And then there's people like myself. I got my master's five years ago, and I love teaching adult education, I really consider this my profession, and it's really hard for me to continue to work here just because I don't have benefits."
In an op-ed published in the Press Herald last week, part-time teacher Shoshana Hoose wrote that the school's current pay scale hinders retention and recruitment.
"I've seen many talented young teachers come and go from PAE because they couldn't support themselves on the low pay," she wrote. "That also makes it difficult for the school to fulfill its goal of diversifying its workforce so that it better represents our student body."
Shulman said just four Portland Adult Ed staff members out of nearly 60 are people of color, despite the overwhelmingly African student population. Having higher pay and a more sustainable job structure, union organizers argue, is an important step toward diversifying staff.
"Having a diverse staff that look like your students, part of it is having jobs that can support that," Sylvester said.
Scallon said the district recognizes the importance of those goals and is working on increasing its overall staff diversity, which has been slowly climbing over the last decade.
One item included in the proposed budget for the next fiscal year is a review of Portland Adult Education, a $150,000 item. Scallon said that review would be mostly programmatic and would not focus on pay.
The goal is to create a strategic plan for the growing school, he said, with a focus on potentially serving more students, offering more classes or creating more workforce partnerships. The funding would bring in a contracted worker to complete that review.
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