In the back of our contract, there’s an article that has not been invoked in years. With the period of increasing enrollment we faced for so long, in fact, prior to our work over the last couple of months, there was no one left in the district – on either the Union of Administrative sides – who truly understood its history or how to apply it.

I believe, now that we truly understand it, that in times like these, it is one of the most important articles we have in our contract. Although no contract language can save all jobs at all times, it is important to understand, recognize, appreciate, and protect those articles we do have that offer us some greater degree of protection and stability when it comes to our jobs and our programs.

Without relaying the entire timeline of my recent investigation into Article 43, I will say that reassembling its meaning was not an easy task. It meant meetings with past grievance chairs, interviews with retirees who were impacted by the Article decades ago, and collaboration with NYSUT. It meant spending Spring Break with 30 years of our Union’s documented history, reviewing decades of grievances, arbitration, contract proposals, notes from informal conversations between the Union and the District, Board agendas, enrollment calculations, and just about every excess letter distributed since the late 1970s.

At the end of all that, the meaning of the Article became very clear…

Article 43 (Pupil-Teacher Ratio) in the contract is a “job security” clause that applies to most members of our Bargaining Unit. Although the explanation of how to apply the formula was removed from the contract in the early 1980s, the Union fought to uphold the long-accepted practice and won in arbitration in 1984. The outcome of that case confirmed the Union’s position on how to apply the ratios.

Basically, in order to determine how many positions the District is allowed to abolish in a given area, you take the projected enrollment for that area, then subtract the current enrollment, and divide by the ratio.

The ratios are prescribed in the contract as follows (I’m omitting the number of students and teachers there were at the time, because those numbers are not totally relevant here, but they exist in the contract):

SUBJECT RATIO
K-6 23.10
Art (K-12) 435.24
Music (K-12) 345.77
Phys. Ed (K-12) 277.85
Guidance (K-12) 228.94
Special Ed. (K-12) 12.97
Secondary Academic (7-12)
includes English, LOTE, science, SS, math and health
23.97
Reading (K-12) 40.00
Speech 1857.91
Psychologists 1208.54
Business 125.95
FACS 197.41
Technology 179.22

So in order to excess one Speech teacher, for example, the district needs to lose 1,857.91 students. To excess one in Art, it would need to lose 435.24, and so forth.

Again, while no contract can protect all jobs and programs, it’s important to understand what this means in a climate like ours. Where other districts have already taken an axe, for example, to elementary music, ours could not excess seven music teachers unless we lost 2,420 students. We have some degree of insulation that others may not. Our class size cap, total student load cap (which is the same as a class size cap for elementary teachers), and pupil-teacher ratio articles in the contract, together, do a lot to maintain programs and positions in the district.

With a terrible enrollment decline, I need to be honest in communicating that we still have very challenging times ahead – for the foreseeable future, in fact. In addition, other factors like retirements (which are exempt from the ratio) and elective requests (which might render need higher in one area than another) still have an impact on our ability to predict staffing with total certainty. In the early 90s, the District also gained the ability to go back an additional year, if it didn’t excess, when calculating the number allowed in a current year. Each of these factors influences the abolition of positions.

This all being said, I believe that Article 43 does even more than protect jobs and programs. In other places of work, an employer’s freedom to hire and fire at-will is almost completely unfettered. Here, however, seniority and the contract should, moving forward, offer some degree of stability and predictability in looking at staffing.

If, for example, I am 4 or 5 spots up a list with a ratio of 400 (I’m using simple numbers for illustrative purposes here), and the enrollment is declining by 200 students per year, I know that the District could abolish 1 position every two years. Working with those numbers, it could be 8-10 years before getting up to me on the list.

Using a more concrete example, if the 7-12 enrollment declines by 130 between next year and the following year, which we can loosely predict by subtracting out graduating classes and adding the incoming 6th graders in each year, we would divide the number 130 by 23.97 (the Secondary Academic ratio). This means that in that year, the District would only be allowed to excess 5.4 secondary teachers from English, math, science, SS, LOTE and health combined.

With elementary enrollment decline between this year and next, although original projections were for 17 excesses, the ratio would only have allowed 10. In working closely with the District to uphold the contract and keep teachers working, we were able to drive the number even lower than that.

With the re-discovery of Article 43, all of a sudden, being low in seniority on a given list starts to take on a different meaning. And it’s important that it do that. We are in challenging times, but that does not mean that so many of our brothers and sisters should have to come to work every day fearing for their jobs. Although this Article does not offer 100% certainty on staffing, it certainly narrows the field of possible outcomes when the District develops budgets and looks at staffing and program. In the coming weeks and months, we will continue to seek clarification of any remaining questions about the Ratio formula.