by Jim Boyle
Editor
District 728 custodians will not be outsourced anytime soon, following the March 14 approval of tentative contracts with Service Employees International Union Local 284, which represents the district’s secretaries, clerks, cooks and custodians.
The Elk River Area School Board approved the contracts on the consent agenda of the March 14 meeting.
All District 728 employees within Local 284 will receive 1.5 percent increases to their salaries effective July 1, 2015, and July 1, 2016, along with any applicable step movement.
The new contract will also create expanded salary scales that reflect the current environment and position the district to be sustainable in the long-term, according to Tim Caskey, the district’s executive director of labor relations and personnel.
Custodians will go from having a three-year scale to a nine-year scale with a lower starting wage than the current salary schedule.
Clerks and secretaries go from three-year scale to a six-year scale, with a lower starting wage than the current salary schedule.
Cooks will go from a three-year scale to an eight-year scale with a lower starting wage than the current salary schedule.
While custodians did not agree to anything that would allow the district to outsource the services of full-time employees, the two sides did come to terms a memorandum of agreement regarding part-time grounds and custodial crews.
The agreement prohibits the outsourcing of full-time custodial work for the time period of July 1, 2015, through June 29, 2017. The district will continue to review and move forward with the requests for proposals for grounds, Caskey said.
All contract agreements with Local 284 employees provide for a one-time early retirement incentive for those employees who meet the definition of full retirement under Public Employees Retirement Association.
As for teacher contract negotiations, the Elk River Education Association has filed for mediation and is working with the mediator on negotiation dates. The soonest the two groups were to meet is March 21.