Board gives nod to contract
BY KATHY BARATTA Staff Writer

ENGLISHTOWN - Members of the Manalapan-Englishtown Regional School District Board of Education voted unanimously on July 15 to sign a memorandum of agreement on a new contract with the Manalapan-Englishtown Education Association (MEEA).

The MEEA represents 450 faculty members in the Manalapan-Englishtown Regional School District. The district serves children in kindergarten through eighth grade who reside in Manalapan and Englishtown.

According to school board Vice President Donna Formoso, salary guides for the MEEA's members must be mutually agreed upon before the board will be able to take a vote to ratify the contract.

"Both sides will be working together to achieve the salary guides in a timely manner and we are very pleased that an agreement has been reached," she said.

There is no date set for a final vote on the new deal with the district's teachers.

MEEA President Ken Weber was contacted following the board's July 15 action to sign the memorandum of agreement but said he preferred not to make any comment.

According to school district Business Administrator Joseph Passiment, the agreement reached by the two sides after nearly a year of negotiations is actually two contracts - a one-year contract that covers the 2007-08 school year retroactively, and a three-year contract that will cover the 2008-09, 2009- 10 and 2010-11 school years.

The new deal means that teachers will be awarded a 4.3 salary increase for the 2007-08 school year.

The subsequent three-year contract will call for salary increases of 4.3 percent for 2008-09, 4.1 percent for 2009-10, and 4.1 percent for 2010-11, according to Passiment.

The percentage increases (4.3, 4.3, 4.1 and 4.1) actually reflect how much the overall budget for teachers salaries will be increased during each year that is covered by the contract. It is not necessarily the salary increase that every teacher in the district will receive each year.

Passiment previously explained that where a teacher is on the district's salary guide (i.e., years of service and college degrees earned) determines what annual salary increase a teacher will receive.

In other words, the agreement means the school district's overall teachers salary budget line will increase according to the percentages provided in the contract. However, an individual teacher's salary can increase by less than that amount or more than that amount in a given year.

According to Passiment, as teachers approach the top of the salary guide they get more of an increase than the teachers below them on the salary guide or even at the top of the salary guide.