Morgan Hill – School board trustees voted Tuesday to ratify a “side agreement” with the Morgan Hill Federation of Teachers (MHFT) that allows their labor contract – negotiated in September – to finally be signed.
According to MHFT President Donna Foster, all that remained to be done to make the contract official were several issues regarding language, dates, an early-retirement plan and turning notes into more formalized sentences; a “clerical exercise,” she called it.
The board had ratified the tentative contract agreement with the teachers Sept. 12.
Because the contract had not been finalized, Foster and MHFT included that fact as a part of their unfair labor practice complaint to the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB).
During the trustees’ Feb. 13 meeting, Board President Peter Mandel chastised the district for allowing the MHFT labor contract to be in limbo for so long.
“It would appear that it took the unfair labor practices complaint to get this settled, to get this clerical work done,” Mandel said. “Let’s not revel in the idea that something good happened here.”
There were five items in that contract that needed to be “cleaned up,” according to Foster. The items were listed on a document known as a “side letter of agreement,” which was signed by MHUSD Superintendent Alan Nishino and Foster to finalize the contract.
The unsigned contract was one of a list of grievances that union negotiators
were unable to solve when meeting with the district’s negotiators, Foster said, leading to the union’s filing the unfair labor practices complaint with PERB.
She told trustees that Deputy Superintendent Bonnie Tognazzini was “very supportive” throughout the process, and that as soon as the contract was being typed, she would call PERB to have this part of the unfair labor practice complaint removed.
Nishino left the board room when Foster began to speak before discussion of the issue began. He returned at the end of the discussion of the next item on the agenda, which was the union’s contract “reopeners.”
“I am frustrated with the way this happened, and I wish Dr. Nishino was here to hear this,” Mandel said. “This whole process did not go well, we shouldn’t have had so much misunderstanding … It shouldn’t have taken so long to get this typed.
