MARBLEHEAD — The School Committee held its first meeting since the conclusion of the teachers’ strike and although agreements were made, emotions were still high.
The meeting addressed important topics, including how students and faculty would make up school days, upcoming roof repair design plans, and the custodian contract agreements. The School Committee held votes for all three of these proposals and voted unanimously to approve them.
To begin the meeting, School Committee Co-Chair Jenn Schaeffner addressed the room on returning to work and continuing to help students get their education and maximize their achievement. Schaeffner concluded her statement by expressing her appreciation for moving on from the strike and focusing on the future.
Co-Chair Sarah Fox and Marblehead Public Schools Interim Superintendent John Robidoux shared their appreciation for the custodians and food service personnel for their undeniable efforts during the strike. The custodians remained at work throughout the strike, catching up on housekeeping while students and faculty were out of the building. Food service personnel ensured all students had warm meals if needed while they were out of school.
Despite the meeting beginning on a high note, it quickly became a tense atmosphere as topics were being discussed and voted upon.
Due to the strike, 10 school days must be made up to reach the 180-day requirement by the Department of Education. Superintendent Robidoux offered two different plans to make the days up.
Robidoux explained that he had brought every possible avenue to the Department of Education to make days up without using vacation days. He included adding an extra hour to school days to reach the hourly requirement, making up the days virtually, and waiving some of the days. The response from the Department of Education was a resounding “no” for all the possibilities, stating it would imply there are no consequences for teachers to conduct an illegal strike.
The two options for make up days offered was to use the first day of winter break, Dec. 23, use all four days of February break, use all four days of April break, and add one more day to the end of the school year. Option two was to use Dec. 23, all of February break, and the five additional days at the end of the school year, which are usually acquainted for snow days.
The issue with decision two was in the occurrence of a snow day, the school would then have to use April break days to make up the snow days. Option two also would cause a movement in the date for graduation and, by statute, graduation cannot be earlier than 12 days prior to the last day of school.
Then, the option of using Saturdays was brought into question. Robidoux mentioned an alternative to both of those proposals was potentially looking into Saturdays. The issue with making school days on Saturdays is that Saturday is the Sabbath day for the Jewish community.
In response to the proposal for Saturdays, members of the Marblehead Education Association (MEA) who attended the meeting grew frustrated. Co-Chair Sarah Fox addressed over many years they have witnessed how strong the Jewish community is in Marblehead and the importance of respecting their Sabbath day.
President of the MEA Jonathan Heller then began to shout, “Ask them,” in regard to asking the Jewish community.
School Committee member Alison Taylor also brought up the idea of conducting a survey for parents and staff to provide their input on when school days should be made up. Fox later added her opinion being that only families should be given the survey because they did not get to vote on being put in this situation.
MEA member Sally Shevory said in response, “You’ve made it clear all along, it’s never been about the staff, Sarah.”
The School Committee voted unanimously to make Dec. 23 and February break, consisting of Feb. 18 through Feb. 21, scheduled school days for students and staff. The committee also made a point to suspend attendance penalties for those days, if students do not wish to attend or cannot they, or their grades, will not be punished.
The School Committee then discussed the custodian contracts. The committee was unable to ratify the contracts on Nov. 26 when they ratified all of the other contracts due to the custodian representative unable to attend the meeting.
This discussion sparked some confusion between the School Committee and the MEA. An MEA member addressed that they had sent an email to the committee around 4:15 p.m. and did not receive a confirmation email back. The MEA member began clarifying what was sent in the email and ensuring that was what was being ratified at the meeting.
Fox attempted to conclude the conversation stating, “I’m going to pause everyone because I feel like we are now bargaining in public.”
After confusion had settled, the committee voted unanimously to ratify the contract documents for the custodians. They agreed on the one- and three-year contracts. The MEA now must hold a vote amongst themselves to ratify the contracts. Once that has been done, the representative from the custodians unit will sign the contract.
The School Committee moved on to begin discussion on the roof repairs for Marblehead High School (MHS). The roofing at MHS is in dire need of repair according to faculty members, upon inspection of the roof, a need for new heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems also came up.
It’s been recommended that the roof and HVAC repair be done at the same time, according to Fox. She clarified that once the new roof is installed, workers will need to infiltrate the roof to repair the HVAC systems, ultimately expiring the warranty on the roof.
At the meeting, committee members voted unanimously, once again, on the design contract for the roof. The committee emphasized this is simply the design of the roof and does not include the construction contract.
Concern was then raised about the repair of both the roof and HVAC systems. The cost of doing both projects at the same time would result in a budget cost of approximately $11 million. Fox clarified that there are multiple ways to go about the project. For example, MHS is divided into multiple wings and the repairs can be done one wing at a time.
The $11 million is not a guaranteed number, as it has not been decided upon yet to do the projects in conjunction or separately.
After all topics were discussed the meeting was adjourned, but Schaeffner reopened the meeting to allow for one more public comment that was missed due to the attendee being on zoom.
The public comment caused the final outrage of the night from MEA members and other community attendees as the public comment speaker spoke for a long duration of time. MEA members began shouting that the speakers three minutes were up and it was time to cut him off.
Shevory stood up and said, “Stand up for people once in your life, for staff of Marblehead Public Schools, Jenn and Sarah,” then proceeded to exit the room.
“The large majority of the staff has gone back to work, doing their jobs in a professional way that we appreciate. There is a small contingent of staff in leadership of the union that were in attendance that did demonstrate behavior that was less than professional,” Schaeffner said in response to the behavior displayed at the meeting.
“I recognize that it is still an emotional time for the leaders in the union, while I understand that i would hope the professionalism will prevail and we get back to the strong professional staff we have and have counted on all these years,” Schaeffner added.
