Representatives from the Alachua County Education Association (ACEA) and Alachua County Public Schools (ACPS) settled on a 1.3% raise for teachers in a bargaining meeting on Monday. The agreement still needs to be approved by the school board and teachers before it can come into effect.
Teachers previously turned down a salary agreement in January that offered a 1.6% salary increase, retroactive to July 1, 2024, or to the day an employee began working during the school year.
While teachers went back to the bargaining table, hoping for a better offer, Education Support Professionals in the ACEA chose to accept the 1.6% offer in January, and the School Board of Alachua County approved it unanimously.
After the Florida Department of Education released its third Florida Education Finance Program Calculations in early March, the school district found that it would have $6 million less than expected and staff kicked into gear, tightening the belt on ACPS’s budget.
In the meeting, ACEA President Carmen Ward said though she feels the deal is “hostile,” the union will agree to settle because it believes this is the last chance to get any kind of raise, which is the only reason ACEA is willing to agree to the deal.
Ward said the union has surveyed teachers, and 58% said they would vote “yes” to the 1.3% raise, which she called a “slim margin” for a union meant to represent the whole, not a bare majority.
“There was a time when negotiations in this district built a really good amount of rights for the people that work in the public school system because the people on the other side of the table cared about the teachers having rights,” Ward said. “And the people on the other side of the table were not considering the teachers in the public school system as the afterthought that we do after we fund everything else in the world.”
Gabrielle Jaremczuk, assistant superintendent of finance school district representative at the meeting said a lot has changed since ACPS’s 1.6% offer.
“We knew we had decreased enrollment. We had no clue the state was under-projecting their numbers for FES (Florida Empowerment Scholarships),” Jaremczuk said in the meeting. “That was something we did not perceive, and that cost us millions, and it’s projected to affect us every year going forward. I understand that this is not the offer you guys want, I appreciate you taking it.”
The union’s agreement was also contingent on a tentative agreement to maintain current contract language for early release Wednesdays, which allows elementary school teachers an extra hour for planning each week. The district reduced early release Wednesdays to monthly occurrences in July 2024 to add instructional time to the year.
ACEA members, and the SBAC, still need to vote on the contract agreement before it can become official.