Catholic school teachers vote to go on strike

For the first time since 2003, students at Catholic high schools om the Archdiocese of Philadelphia will see their teachers on the picket line when they return to class Wednesday.

Lay instructors the 17 high schools voted this afternoon 589-60 to walk off the job, rejecting the archdiocese's most recent proposal.

The vote at a union meeting at Penns Landing Caterers on Columbus Boulevard came hours after the talks collapsed between the archdiocese and the Association of Catholic Teachers, Local 1776.

After the vote, union members grabbed picket signs and headed for a rally outside the archdiocese's headquarters on North 17th Street in Center City.

Union President Rita Schwartz said she wanted parents and students to know that she hoped teachers would return to the classroom soon but it was up to the archdiocese to make a new offer acceptable to her members.

Money and working conditions have been described as the sticking points in the contract talks.

The archdiocese said earlier in a statement that talks collapsed when union negotiators walked away from the bargaining table.

It said negotiations broke off with "significant issues not agreed upon or in some cases even discussed."

"The Archdiocese made multiple concessions in our proposals and believes the contract offered to the teachers is equitable," the statement said. "It is our hope that our teachers will recognize that a strike is not in their best interest and most certainly not in the best interest of our students and their families."

Richard McCarron, secretary for the Office of Catholic Education, Tuesday called the teachers' decision to strike "a sad day for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia" and said that the archdiocese's negotiating team hoped to resume talks as soon as Wednesday.

He said that his team was disappointed that the teachers union had rejected its latest series of proposals, including an average salary increase of 7.84 percent over three years.

But he said that the contract talks this time focused less on economic issues and more on changing working conditions to reflect altered educational needs, including the ability for schools to add nonunionized part time teachers.

Mary Rochford, the superintendent of Catholic schools, said that each of the high schools has enough non-unionized staff, including administrators and members of religious orders, to oversee students this week while contract talks continue.

The first week of school, she said, is primarily devoted to orientation with the students arriving in phases.

Rochford said at most Catholic high schools, freshmen will report Wednesday, seniors Thursday and sophomore and juniors on Friday.

Sixteen thousand students attend 17 archdiocesean high schools in the five-county region, said Donna Farrell, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese.

The two sides had been negotiating for more than five months to draft a three-year contract to replace the agreement that expired last Wednesday. They had been at odds over the archdiocese's desire to overhaul the contract to reflect the altered educational landscape of the 21st century and to give it greater flexibility and control over teaching assignments and scheduling.

The archdiocese and the union also have debated a preamble the archdiocese has proposed that would spell out the mission of the Catholic secondary schools.

In a letter to parents posted on the archdiocese's website Friday, officials from the Office of Catholic Education said: "We are seeking substantive changes within the labor-management agreement in order to keep pace with current and every-changing educational practices so that we can properly prepare you son or daughter for their post secondary experience of college and/or work."

Rita Schwartz, president of the Association of Catholic Teachers, has said that an overhaul is not needed because the contract has evolved over the last 40 years and has been effective for both the teachers and the Catholic high schools.

A message posted on the union's website said Catholic high school teachers were professionals.

"We profess our faith and faithfully practice our vocation," the statement said. "As professionals, we believe that we have the right and duty to share in the process of determining our working conditions and other terms that affect our professional and personal lives. This process is called collective bargaining.

"We do not feel that the Office of Catholic Education should unilaterally threaten our job security or rewrite our labor-management agreement under the guise of their need to make us more professional."

The archdiocese also proposed adding a preamble spelling out the educational mission of its secondary schools.

The association called the proposals anti-teacher and anti-union.

The office of Catholic Education last week rejected the union's request for an outside mediator to help resolve the dispute, saying "no mediator has ever been utilized to reach a contract settlement in the history of our negotiations dating back decades."

The archdiocese and the Association of Catholic Teachers signed their first contract in 1968.

The union represents 711 lay teachers. The typical Catholic high school teacher earned $50,550 in the last academic year and has been teaching for 20 years, Schwartz said.

The labor dispute does not affect students who attend Catholic elementary schools, whose teachers are not unionized.