Updated at 6:52 p.m.
The Rutland Education Association, the union representing Rutland teachers, voted to strike Thursday afternoon following 18 months of failed contract negotiations. They said their strike will begin May 14 if an agreement with the school board cannot be reached before then.
The decision to strike passed with 93% of the union’s 250 members voting in favor, according to union president Sue Tanen.
“After 18 months of fruitless talks with a board that seems more eager to fight, manipulate, threaten, and walk away than reach a settlement with us, we have had enough and we’re not going to take it anymore,” Tanen said in a press release.
The Rutland City Board of School Commissioners is scheduled to meet Friday, and Tanen said the union set aside time for more talks with the board as soon as Friday.
“We’ll be there,” she said in the release. “We hope the board joins us, so we can avert a disruption of the school year.”
“As always, we are ready to go back to the table, we are ready to meet with the board, we are still hopeful we can reach an agreement,” Tanen said in a subsequent interview with VTDigger.
Tanen quipped that she’s grown weary of how many times she’s voiced the union’s readiness to talk with the board. “We’re teachers, we’re always hopeful,” she said.
The teachers have been working without a contract since the previous one expired in July. Negotiations for a new contract between the Rutland City Board of School Commissioners and the union have been ongoing since January 2024.
The teachers’ union maintains it is seeking pay on par with other educators in the region. The school board has said it is bound by the city’s $63.83 million education budget for the 2024-25 school year, which residents approved on Town Meeting Day in 2024. This year, Rutland voters approved a $67.18 million education budget for the 2025-26 school year.
After Thursday’s strike announcement, Rutland City School District Superintendent Bill Olsen wrote in an email to VTDigger, “Despite the vote outcome, I still believe that the two sides can come to an agreement that offers a fair compensation package while staying within the voter-approved budget, and a contract that is fiscally responsible. I know the Board wants that, and it continues to work very hard to get there. All the other bargaining units in the district were able to achieve that same expectation. We can still achieve this with the teacher unit.”
Faced with an impasse after a year of negotiations, the two sides engaged with an independent fact finder. The fact finder, whose report was released to the parties April 7 and to the public April 18, recommended that salaries be increased by 4.8% for 2024-25, 5% for 2025-26, and 5% for 2026-27, in order to keep pace with other public employees in the region. The fact finder also recommended an increase in allowed sick days from 10 to 12.
The union accepted those terms — though it had initially proposed annual increases of 15%, 10% and 10%, respectively, for each year under the contract.
The board, however, rejected the fact finder’s recommendations and instead offered increases of 4.5%, 4% and 3.5% — an increase from its initial offer of 3% each year.
In a press release issued after publication of the fact finder’s report, Olsen wrote that the report “fails to consider” the existing town budget and did not “properly” account for the 10.3% pension benefit teachers receive.
Following release of the report, the district announced it would need to cut 18 positions and some programs next school year to stay in line with the budget and the suggested increases.
The union has argued the current base teacher salary of $42,078 is well below the living wage for Rutland, which they calculate to be $47,133.
