District 219 Spares 10 Tenured Teachers From Layoff Ax

Niles Township High School District 219 and the teachers' union have reached a tentative agreement to save the jobs of 10 tenured teachers who faced expiration of their contracts.

School board president Robert Silverman announced the deal Monday night. Early last month, the Niles Township Federation of Teachers was told that the contracts of .

The agreement, which has not been formally presented to the full school board or the teachers' union, would mean that nontenured teaching staff would be laid off from the district's Niles West and Niles North high schools.

Silverman made the announcement after nearly a dozen people, including students, teachers and parents, spoke in support of the educators who had received layoff notices.

Niles West science teacher Ruth Gleicher talked about the distress that the bargaining process had created.

Gleicher, a 17-year teaching veteran who holds national board certification, said the atmosphere and uncertainty created by the bargaining process–to determine which teachers will stay and which ones will go–had her considering early retirement for the first time.

“There is a terrible combative feeling in our buildings,” she said. “It exists. It is true. Every teacher feels it.

"I suddenly feel like I’m an expense to the school, not an asset,” Gleicher added.

The staffing changes, which were approved Feb. 7, are part of that has District 219 placing more emphasis on the core areas of math and reading. At the same time, health would be incorporated into sophomore physical education classes and some classes in the applied sciences and technology department would be eliminated, with their curriculum rolled into other classes.

Applied science and technology includes classes ranging from child development to fashion design to business law to automotive.

Six tenured physical welfare teachers and four tenured applied sciences and technology teachers were told their jobs would be cut. The moves would mean savings of about $1 million during the next school year, Silverman said at the Feb. 7 meeting.

At the time, he noted that the district and the teachers’ union were negotiating over the way next year’s staffing would ultimately play out, but the Illinois School Code and the current contract required the layoff notifications in early February.

The restructuring plan calls for health–now a one-semester stand-alone course in the physical welfare department–to be folded into sophomore physical education, reducing the physical welfare requirement from nine semesters to eight. It also will eliminate some courses in the department of applied science and technology, with the understanding that their content would be covered in remaining courses.

Pankaj Sharma, president of the  Niles Township Federation of Teachers, had argued that the district did not need any immediate staffing cuts because it had more than $110 million in reserves. He urged the district to use that cash cushion to soften the blow, cutting positions as teachers retire.

But Silverman noted that the district has added several programs in recent years, and that couldn’t continue indefinitely.

“We can’t continue to add, add, add, add, add, because the money is fairly finite,” he said. “Now that we’ve restructured, we have 10 teachers too many.”

But he acknowledged that the process for setting next year’s staffing plan had been difficult.

“I don’t think it had to get this messy, but it did,” Silverman said.

District 219 Superintendent Nanciann Gatta said she also did not like the situation.

“It does concern me--the level of anxiety and angst that exists,” she said. “Every year, we have 10 or 15 teachers who leave and 10 or 15 who come back.”

The annual negiations over staffing is a result of long-term bargaining agreements, Gatta said. While she supports the need for a union and working under a multiyear contract, there must be provisions to address classes to be offered more frequently rather than every three to five years, she said.

“When you make changes in the program, sometimes you just need less teachers,” Gatta said.