Fairfax County teachers just approved historic contracts
What the union deal would change for employees and schools — and where the meals tax and casino might factor in
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Teachers and staff of Fairfax County Public Schools voted this week to approve three-year contracts that would raise pay across the board, protect teachers’ planning time and enshrine new labor rights in one of the nation’s largest school districts.
Union leaders say the tentative agreements with FCPS — covering its 27,500 employees — would represent the country’s largest public-sector collective-bargaining victory since 1999. Members of the education unions voted to ratify the contracts late Monday, with more than 98% in favor.
“This contract is more than just an agreement. It was a life-changing step forward in Fairfax, and so when [we won] this, we set the stage for this kind of progress to happen across the country,” Leslie Houston, president of the Fairfax Education Association, told The Machine on a phone call Tuesday. “If Fairfax County can achieve this, then so can everybody else.”
But achieving it in Fairfax still hinges on funding and on approval from the School Board and the Board of Supervisors. Persuading the latter, Houston said, “is going to be our fight.”
[Fairfax teachers will bargain for a contract: What it means for schools and what’s next]
Houston’s FEA had partnered with the Fairfax County Federation of Teachers since June to seek contracts on behalf of FCPS’s instructional employees — including teachers, counselors and librarians — and its operational employees, such as bus drivers, cafeteria workers and custodians. Union leaders surveyed workers across FCPS and submitted their initial proposal by the last day of August.
Once the joint bargaining committee made it to the table, after years of lobbying and waiting for the right to get there, the contract agreement came together so quickly that it surprised David Walrod, Houston’s counterpart as president of the FCFT. The unions and the school district ramped up to twice-a-week meetings in October, he said, reaching a tentative agreement and shaking hands after midnight on Halloween.
“There was a lot of incentive on both sides to get this deal done,” Walrod said.
School Board Chair Karl Frisch said Tuesday that the contract will come before the School Board in January for a vote in February.
Here’s what to know about what teachers and staff stand to win, what the contracts would mean for schools, and where taxes (and maybe that Tysons casino) factor in.
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Pay raises for all
FCPS employees wanted “to try to make up some of what had been lost” to salary and step freezes, Walrod said, and to “get back closer to where they should be.”
The contracts agreed to in bargaining, which would take effect next July if approved, would bring raises across both units:
7% pay raises for employees in the first year.
3% raises in the second and third years.
Additional salary steps in years two and three for eligible employees.
Salary floors weren’t a part of negotiations, Walrod said, but the operational contract would raise salaries for FCPS’s lowest-paid employees in food service and transportation.
“If we can win this, we will be pulling folks out of poverty,” Houston said.
Fairfax County has had some of the highest teacher salaries in the commonwealth, but it has among the highest costs of living, too. For some employees, raises could put living in the school district themselves a bit more within reach.
Union leaders say the benefits would benefit schools and students, too.
“I think that it’s going to put us on a path to being a place that people want to spend a 30-year career,” Walrod said. “It’s going to improve retention. It’s going to make it easier to recruit.”
Small wins on health care and leave
FCPS’s health insurance moved from CareFirst to Cigna two years ago, Walrod said, “and to make a long story short, that switch was not ideal.”
In negotiations, FCPS agreed to soften next year’s insurance-cost hikes for employees and to rebid for a provider. Under the contracts’ terms, a new health committee — composed half of employees — will review workers’ needs and generate ideas and proposals.
Negotiations over employee leave, meanwhile, yielded mixed results:
The contracts would give employees three dedicated days for bereavement leave a year, rather than having to draw from their sick-leave balances, as current FCPS policy dictates.
Personal leave also comes out of sick leave, and principals in FCPS have broad authority to deny requests for it. Walrod wanted to include language to ensure access to personal leave if an employee put in for it far enough in advance, like 30 days, but “we weren’t able to get the district to budge,” he said.
Preserving teachers’ planning time
For the most part, the contracts for instructional and operational employees are “completely parallel,” Walrod said, but each includes a few distinct causes. One is a measure to protect teachers’ planning time.
FCPS apportions 300 minutes a week for elementary school educators to plan their lessons without bleeding over into their personal time. But not every principal has honored that time, Walrod said, and the upheaval of the pandemic ate into it further.
Teachers’ contracts would mandate that team meetings count toward at most 60 minutes a week of that planning time and that schools provide planning time in blocks of at least 30 minutes, rather than cobbling together 10 minutes here and there.
[Fairfax County’s big change on school boundaries, explained]
New protections for teachers and staff
Virginia had stripped teachers of bargaining rights for more than four decades, before Gov. Ralph Northam (D) signed a bill in 2020 eroding the ban. Fairfax County authorized collective bargaining for its employees thereafter.
Now, the contracts would codify a pair of notable labor protections for FCPS workers:
“Just Cause” protections for discipline and dismissal. The unions say it’s the first K-12 collective bargaining agreement in Virginia to enshrine them.
Weingarten Rights — the right for employees to take union representation in meetings with management that could result in disciplinary action.
The caveat on funding
School districts in Virginia don’t have taxing authority to raise money for things like raises. The county would need to find funding, and Houston said FEA members have already started lobbying the Board of Supervisors.
It could be a tricky proposition. Some Fairfax residents already struggle with (and/or complain about) the county’s taxes, and Superintendent Michelle Reid scaled back planned FCPS raises just earlier this year because of “significantly lower-than-requested funding levels.”
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Walrod said the agreement comes with a February “reopener clause,” which would allow the two sides to come back together if funding doesn’t. He’s hoping they won’t need to trigger it.
But the funding question is where the FCFT’s support for the proposed Tysons entertainment (and casino) district comes in.
“We know that there are some members of the Board of Supervisors that aren’t big fans of that idea, which we understand,” Walrod said, “but at the same time, if the Board of Supervisors says that they don’t want this plan, then we want to see them come up with a different plan for raising the sort of money that the entertainment district could have.”
Walrod told The Machine that the FCFT hasn’t taken a position on a possible county meals tax, which area restaurants mobilized against this fall.
“But speaking as an individual, I want to see our contract get funded,” he said. “I want to see our folks being treated the way that they need to be treated.”