Pittsburgh Public Schools employees and administrators have reached a series of tentative contracts for the district’s teachers, clerical workers and student support staff, six months after the previous set of union contracts expired.
School board members will vote next week to ratify new four-year contracts, which lift a decades-old provision requiring the district’s roughly 2,500 paraprofessional, technical and clerical employees to live within Pittsburgh city limits.
Union leaders have long urged the district to lift the mandate, especially as PPS continues to struggle to fill many positions that fall under it. The district is projected to face 172 vacancies at the start of 2025, according to chief financial officer Ron Joseph.
Teachers topped the list of vacant positions Joseph presented to school board members last week, followed by custodial staff, school principals and classroom support staff.
While representatives of the teachers' union could not be immediately reached for comment, school board members and administrators voiced their satisfaction with the contract.
“I'm excited that we're about to ratify it without a work stoppage because that's so important. Our teachers are important, and we want our staff here to serve our children,” district superintendent Wayne Walters said Wednesday.
The district’s previous-year labor contracts expired on June 30. The new agreement raises pay for most teachers by $1,500 to $2,650 annually. Paraprofessional and clerical bargaining units agreed to 4% and 3% salary increases, respectively, for the contract’s first year.
The contract for teachers also preserves healthcare benefits post-retirement and strengthens language around the responsibilities of Instructional Teacher Leaders (ITLs). ITLs serve as peer support and mentors to other educators within their department, contributing to teacher professional development and facilitating analysis of student outcomes.
The contract also phases out pay incentives for teachers at hard-to-staff schools, as well as those based on student test scores and other state-assessed measures of student achievement.
“With any negotiation, there was some give and take, but they worked with us in good faith and we were able to pull it together,” said school board president Gene Walker.
Surpluses define 2024 budget, with deficit projected for 2025
The labor agreements come as school board members prepare to vote next week on a $752 million budget for 2025. That’s a 1.8% increase from what administrators presented in their preliminary budget, raising the projected deficit from $20.8 million to $28.1 million.
Revenues also increased by nearly $6 million between the preliminary and final budgets, though they’re outpaced by a projected spike in the district’s charter school tuition obligations. Payments on behalf of district students attending charter schools increased to nearly $167 million, constituting 22% of the district’s total spending next year.
Joseph attributed the change to the updated charter tuition rate, which increased by 11%, or $2,221 per student not receiving special education services.
The final budget proposal does not include a tax increase and complies with the board’s minimum fund balance policy. Joseph also said the longer the projected 172 vacancies go unfilled, the more the district’s actual expenditures could change.
That means the district could end up with a surplus similar to this year’s spare $5.6 million, a far cry from the $30 deficit administrators initially projected for 2024. The vacancies account for $17.4 million of budgeted spending.
“We have a lot of vacancies that created or added to our creation of a surplus,” Walters told WESA. “And so it's not that we didn't budget, but when we have challenges with filling vacancies and the money's available, that creates that dynamic.”
But several speakers at Monday night’s public hearing urged district leaders to reconsider their decision to cut the district’s free summer learning program, Summer B.O.O.S.T., given the excess funding.
PPS has relied on federal pandemic relief to fund Summer B.O.O.S.T. each year since 2021. Since those funds expired at the start of this school year, administrators opted not to allocate the additional $2.4 million needed to operate the program.
Walters said last month student outcomes weren’t demonstrating a return on the district investment into Summer B.O.O.S.T., in part due to attendance and enrollment challenges. But parents speaking Monday said poor communication from the district and restrictive registration policies are instead to blame.
Valerie Allman-Webb, a parent and community organizer. said B.O.O.S.T. serves the district’s most vulnerable families, who wouldn’t be able to otherwise afford summer learning opportunities.
“Those are the people we need to retain. Those are the people we need to hold close,” Allman-Webb said.
“And it's also the people that we should be focusing on when it comes to how we spend our money.”
Parents also expressed concern that the district would cut several positions for educators serving English language learners, a fast-growing student population at PPS.
Joseph clarified Wednesday that while several positions were moved out of the district’s general fund budget, they would continue to be funded through the state’s Ready to Learn block grant.
“We are not terminating and or reducing any funding for any positions for ESL because that is a growing population,” he said.
