District, teachers at impasse over contract negotiation
The Rockwood Administrative Annex, which typically only hosts 5-10 visitors at any given Board of Education meeting, was filled with attendees at the Nov. 7 meeting.
A sea of red filled the chairs of the meeting room, community members adorning the color in support of the Rockwood National Education Association.
Rockwood’s policy regarding patron comments dictates that comments must pertain to agenda items, so community members spoke in regards to the American Education Week Proclamation. A number of Rockwood educators, or representatives of Rockwood educators who were unable to attend the meeting, spoke about the importance of teachers in the classroom.
This meeting happened amid the RNEA’s contract negotiation with Rockwood, a negotiation that determines teachers’ salaries and benefits for the coming three years.
At the Dec. 17 BOE Meeting at Rockwood Summit, the day after RNEA members voted to reject Rockwood’s proposed contract, an even larger crowd of RNEA supporters flooded the Auditorium.
A major agenda item was an hour-long budget presentation which would close out the Board meeting. So, during patron comments, many spoke about Rockwood teachers’ salaries in comparison to neighboring districts.
RNEA President Thomas Cook said that during negotiations, both sides reached tentative agreements for all issues except those of salary and family medical leave.
The issues which reached tentative agreement included: microcredentials, enhanced RNEA and administrative presence in buildings with a focus on trust and respect, positive and safe school enviornments, job-embedded professional development, and consistent practices across buildings that respect teacher time while effectively meeting the needs of students.
“We recognize and understand the truth that Rockwood is not as relatively wealthy as other school districts. It might have more revenue, but it also has more expenditures because it is a large district with a large number of students,” Cook said.
However, Cook believes the educator salaries within Rockwood should fall in a ranking similar to that of the district’s relative wealth.
“[Rockwood salaries for] Bachelor step one ranks 20th. We are not ranked 20th as far as relative wealth, we are more mid-point,” Cook said. “So we are really asking to get to mid-point or better, recognizing that, in the current financial reality, we are not going to be number one.”
Rockwood was at their goal of mid-point as recently as two negotiations ago, Cook said, but has since dropped in rankings.
“Every budget document going back years has mentioned the need for competitive salaries and/or salaries being at county midpoint,” Cook said. “Our rankings have actually been going in the opposite direction, dropping quite precipitously in some places.”
Steps refer to an additional year of work within the district. For example, a person on BA Step 1 has a bachelor’s degree and is working their first year in the district.
The other issue which failed to reach tentative agreement was family medical leave.
Currently Rockwood offers up to 12 weeks of unpaid family medical leave. A number of different circumstances can be considered a family medical leave event, Cook said, from the birth of a child to adoption of a child or even taking care of a sick family member.
“In Rockwood, in order to be paid for FML, you have to have the sick days accrued to cover it. We get 10 sick days and two personal days every year,” Cook said.
While unused sick days roll over to the following year, Cook said that the time it takes to accrue the necessary number of sick days to take paid leave is an issue.
“It is especially important and serious for the teachers that don’t have the sick days banked yet, and also for parents if they have multiple kids [or educators that] have multiple FML qualifying events,” Cook said.
Family medical leave has been a topic of discussion in previous negotiations, which have since allowed educators to borrow up to 30 days from the district, Cook said. From then on, unused sick days are then used to pay back that “debt” rather than rolling over into the following year.
“We have some educators that improved FML policies and procedures are important to them because if you borrow, you can’t borrow again until you’ve ‘paid back’ all of the days,” Cook said. “So it could be years before you can borrow again. But at the same time, the district [is] taking your unused sick days to put toward the days you borrowed, so you’re not accruing a lot of days.”
Ultimately, Cook said, all of these issues come down to recruitment and retention of “highly qualified staff.”
Cook said that districts offering higher salaries, better benefits and improved family medical leave policies tend to be more likely to recruit beginning teachers and attract teachers from other districts.
“This is about the system as a whole because being able to recruit and retain highly qualified staff then affects the success of students,” Cook said. “If we cannot continue to recruit and retain highly qualified staff, that is going to affect the caliber of education that Rockwood can provide.”
With the number of candidates for educator positions shrinking, Cook said it is important for Rockwood to stay competitive with their salary and benefits in order to prevent the district from becoming a stepping-stone.
While Cain agrees that Rockwood’s ranking in terms of teacher salary needs to be higher, he says it is not simply a matter of affording higher salaries, but being able to sustain them.
“The question of rank of salary, where our teacher’s rank in terms of salaries in St. Louis County, is a source of conversation. We don’t debate that we’d like to do more. The great question is how do we afford what we ultimately do? How do we sustain whatever it is we land on as we move forward as a school district?” Cain said. “It’s not a question of what we would like to do, it’s a question of what we can ultimately afford.”
In the final proposal, the district presented a salary increase of 12% over three years, and an initiative to continue discussions and engage in studies of family medical leave procedures in preparation for the 2027 negotiation.
“We were very purposeful and intentional to be as respectful as we could, and there was no back and forth of ‘well, let’s start at 3.0% over three years,’ that’s disrespectful. We laid out the largest number that we possibly could, and our offer of 5.25% is the most that we can afford [in] the first year of the three year agreement,” Cain said.
At the Nov. 17 Board meeting, Cain said that he believes in order to meet the salary increases desired, the matter will have to be voted on.
“From my humble opinion, it is increasingly appearing as though we are going to have to do something at the ballot for that to take place,” Cain said. “I’m just speaking the fiscal reality.”
Cain believes the best course of action in this negotiation is to use a multi-prong strategy.
“Let’s address and give the best that we can at this particular point in time, and if we’re going to go before our community and have conversation about something that looks different, that’s a separate conversation for a separate day,” he said.
However, he still hopes to reach a compromise that will satisfy educators.
“It’s important that we are able to find a way to land this so that our teachers can be paid to the fullest extent of what we can afford moving forward as a school district,” Cain said. “I believe we are at a point where we need to do something that looks different and that means coming before our community to have some additional conversation, literally at the ballot, what can we do differently, because we are at a place in space and time where we need to do something that looks different.”
Outside of negotiations, Cain said Rockwood has been working to make positive changes for educators. One example being a 7-minute earlier school start time for the 2025-2026 school year which allows for three less student-attendance days and an end date before memorial day.
Although the RNEA and Rockwood have yet to reach agreement on the topic of compensation, Cain hopes that will change.
“We don’t want to stay frozen, and that is why we are more than willing to keep the door open so that we can have more conversation with our RNEA colleagues and that we can land something so we can move forward as a district. I believe that we move best when we are able to do it together being Rockwood,” Cain said. “I know there’s four high schools, I know that there’s more than a bit of competition across the four high schools, I’ve been to the Battle of 109. But at the end of the day, this truly is one Rockwood, and I believe we simply move best not only as a district but as a community when we have all the arrows pointed in one direction.”
Currently the RNEA and Rockwood have agreed to come back to the table for further discussions, although a date for that meeting has not yet been set.
Library Media Specialists Nichole Ballard-Long and Jane Lingafelter believe that the proposed salaries will create challenges for both recruitment and retention due to their low ranking compared to surrounding districts.
“The district has had a goal for quite some time to get us to the midpoint of the salaries across the region, but we are still in the bottom third depending on where you look,” Lingafelter said. “Salary is important for us to stay competitive and for us to retain and attract teachers. Right now, we can’t do that with the salaries that [Rockwood is] currently proposing.”
It is not simply a question of staying competitive with neighboring districts, said Ballard-Long, but of meeting the cost of living in the Rockwood School District.
“I think teachers want to feel valued, and one of the ways that value is felt is through the ability to have a living wage,” Ballard-Long said. “There are teachers who work in [Rockwood] who feel they can’t afford a house in this district because their compensation is not such that allows them to afford to live here.”
Salaries which do not meet the cost of living force many teachers to supplement their income with second jobs or side gigs.
“We have teachers who have second jobs working on weekends or evenings or trying to work every after school activity and athletic event just to earn additional money,” Lingafelter said.
With the accreditation of individual teachers and the district as a whole, they believe educator compensation should reflect that.
“[Educators] try to amp up their salary when we are pretty highly educated and highly qualified staff,” Ballard-Long said.
“We have a district where it’s rated very highly [by] U.S. News and World Report,” Lingafelter said with Ballard-Long adding, “[also by] Niche reports that relators use. With a district so highly rated, the staff should be fairly compensated.”
Even the proposed 12% increase over three years would fail to truly improve compensation for those who have worked in the district for a significant amount of time, Ballard-Long said.
“The salaries they are currently proposing don’t even really provide a cost of living increase for people at the mid to upper range of the salary scale,” Ballard-Long said. “We’d be looking at less than $50 [more] a paycheck, which is not an inflation raise.”
Neither Ballard-Long nor Lingafelter have ever considered leaving the district, both because they love it so much and because they have been working here for 26 and 29 years, respectively.
“We both live in the district but we both also have spouses that have full time jobs and salaries, so we’re not single parents within the district, and we have double incomes,” Ballard-Long said. “I love this district. I love working here.”
“I graduated from Lafayette High School,” Lingafelter added. “I went to Chesterfield Elementary, Crestview and then graduated from here.”
Regardless, they feel as though Rockwood has been putting off the task of improving teacher salaries.
It seems like there’s always a ‘We’re going to get you guys next time. Next time there’s going to be a better increase, we’ll be in a better place financially'” Ballard-Long said. “It seems like the wait should maybe be over.”
While Ballard-Long and Lingafelter say their dual-income household contributes to their ability to live within the district, not every Lafayette educator can say the same.
An anonymous LHS teacher, the sole income source for their household, has had to toy with the idea of moving districts in search of a higher salary.
Moving is not something they want to do, as they love their coworkers and students in Rockwood, but with their current salary, it has been something they have had to consider.
“I think there is money to be paying teachers better and I think how we budget our money is an issue,” the anonymous teacher said. “If Rockwood values their students, they should value their educators. They’re going to miss out on hiring educators who go to districts [that] pay better.”
In their time at Lafayette, they have met and heard about teachers moving to higher paying districts after already being a part of Rockwood. They’ve also heard of candidates rejecting Rockwood employment offers in favor of a better offer elsewhere.
“I know that a while ago, principals fought to have better pay for this district and now we are one of the best paying districts for administration. I feel like that can happen for teachers as well,” the source said. “It just needs to be valued.”
From their perspective, the anonymous source said it seems as though the district is telling community members a different story than educators are.
“I feel like the community is not aware of the disparity, I don’t think [they] are really aware of how we feel and what we’re making,” they said. “When the board said in order to raise our salary, there was going to have to be a tax increase, it seemed to me like that was going to turn the public against our cause unnecessarily. Nobody asked for there to be a tax increase, I think it’s how we allocate our funds.”
In order to make extra money, the anonymous source takes on a number of extra duties around the school and knows colleagues who do the same.
“I shouldn’t be having to supplement my income to feel comfortable in this economy [when I have] a full time job with advanced degrees on top of my requirements,” they said.
In terms of Family Medical Leave, while the anonymous source believes changes need to be made to the system, they believe that’s a national issue that needs to be addressed, rather than one exclusive to Rockwood.
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