Prince William school staffers begin collective bargaining push

Just as students return from winter break, the push for collective bargaining rights for Prince William County Public Schools employees is beginning.

With schools now reopened after last week’s snow days, representatives for the Prince William Education Association at the division’s 94 school buildings planned to begin collecting signatures from teachers, custodians, transportation staff and other school employees. The association hopes to bring a collective bargaining proposal to the School Board before the end of the spring semester.

If the association can get support from over half of the division’s employees, the board will have 90 days to respond to the proposal and could usher in collective bargaining for school employees for the first time in county history.

The new push for bargaining rights is the result of a 2020 law passed by the General Assembly repealing the state’s prohibition on public-sector bargaining, which had been in place since 1977. The law went into effect in May, and teachers in Richmond were the first to successfully win collective bargaining rights, last month.

Efforts are also underway to establish a bargaining process for Prince William County employees, with the Board of County Supervisors voting 5-2 in December to start work on a bargaining ordinance. Advocates from the Prince William Education Association – the teachers union – say their effort is part of a broader push for public-sector employees rights in the county and that it won’t only benefit school division employees.

The division, like others across the country, is facing a staffing shortage that has only worsened since the start of the pandemic and is hindering plans to boost academic performance and recover learning lost while schools were fully virtual for almost a year. And just as the shortages have affected all kinds of school departments, from classroom staff to transportation and food services, the union hopes to bargain for more competitive wages for all staff, making the positions more attractive.

“We are wanting and we’re aiming to be able to bargain for all groups outside of the administration, and that includes members and non-members of PWEA,” PWEA President Maggie Hansford said.

Speaking to InsideNoVa and at School Board meetings, teachers have expressed numerous complaints about the administration this year, many of which they say have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Staff have already won certain concessions from the division, such as compensation for time spent waiting for the short-staffed buses to pick up all students after school and for planning periods lost to substitute duty or meetings (the division also has a severe shortage of substitutes). Hansford and others say the division is losing teachers and in general has an issue with retention, although they didn’t have data about retention levels.

But many teachers have said that those issues only scratch the surface of how much teachers are asked to do outside what’s in their contracts and that the division will need to keep pace with nearby counties in terms of pay to get staffing to sufficient levels. Other school systems around Northern Virginia are in the process of similar bargaining efforts.

“If we were to hire more teachers and make our class sizes smaller, not only would it make our teaching more effective but it would also make our jobs a lot less stressful,” said Jerod Gay, a language arts teacher at George Hampton Middle School. “There’s definitely a feeling, I think, among teachers not just in the county but across the country, of desperation right now.”

According to the Virginia Department of Education’s most recent salary survey, the budgeted average salary for a Prince William teacher in fiscal year 2021 was $70,281. That’s ahead of nearby municipalities like Manassas and Manassas Park, but the division – the second-largest in the state – lags well behind the state’s biggest, Fairfax (at over $79,000) and also trails Loudoun County and Alexandria.

Teachers say that when you consider that most of them had to pay for a master’s degree, those pay levels don’t cut it in an increasingly expensive area.

Ultimately, teacher pay is dictated in large part by state and county contributions to the division, something the School Board and county administrators have little control over. But union representatives say they want to help the division better allocate funding to keep money where it needs to be.

Brandie Provenzano, a Battlefield High School language arts teacher who’s been with the division for 20 years, used a recent example of the division rolling out an online textbook in classrooms.

“This is a huge push from the county, this online textbook. I could have told them ahead of time, let’s not spend our money … on an online textbook. Our students are tired of looking at screens, they’re begging for paper and pencil. I don’t need an online textbook, I’ve been teaching for 20 years and everything I need is already out there,” she said. “If you asked teachers and educators, they would say ‘We did not need that.’ But now we have it and the schools paid a premium for it.”

The program, called HMH Into Literature, cost over $2 million, according to division staff. 

Union members also say that their requests don’t stop at better pay. They say they’ll also fight for better all-around services for students, such as more counseling and social worker staff that can help students and lighten the load on teachers, or more funding for teacher support that actually help to drive home learning for students.

“If I’m teaching in a class of 32 high school students and one of my students is struggling emotionally that day … they need help right then. Is it going to come from me? I’ve got 31 students in the classroom waiting. Or is there a counselor available? But the counselors are all tied up because we’re understaffed. … When we’re talking about resources, I’m talking about people. It’s not about just money,” Provenzano said. “If we don’t have a seat at the table to be a part of the conversation, we cannot advocate for resources our students need, we can’t advocate for the things that would keep the professionals, the best of the best, in the profession.”

One possible complication to the bargaining effort could come from within the PWEA’s leadership. In October, the Virginia Education Association – the PWEA’s parent organization – stepped in to take over the local chapter’s finances, bylaws and elections after an internal power struggle.

If the PWEA can collect the requisite signatures and the School Board decides to grant bargaining rights, school employees will elect bargaining representation through a secret ballot. And though at the time Hansford and her allies at PWEA said the VEA takeover might jeopardize the push for collective bargaining, Hansford now insists that the organizations are working together.

“PWEA and VEA are working together to further the best interests of our students and educators in Prince William,” she told InsideNoVa. “As president, I continue to focus on encouraging PWCS division and School Board leadership to take action towards implementing collective bargaining.”

A number of School Board members have already expressed a willingness to work with the teachers union on a collective bargaining process and showed support for PWEA leadership in its internal struggle against the VEA last fall.