MANDATA - Recent teacher contract talks in the Line Mountain School District have begun to look less like negotiations and more like a standoff.
And manning each side's offense are two men who go head to head at a handful of other strife-ridden districts in the area.
In Line Mountain Board of Directors' corner is Benjamin L. Pratt, a lawyer with CGA Law Firm, York, who specializes in representing management at collective bargaining tables. He said he has 20 years experience negotiating between school boards and teachers unions and represents numerous school boards statewide.
In addition to Line Mountain, area schools Pratt represents include Danville, Millville, Warrior Run and Mount Carmel Area.
In Line Mountain Education Association's (LMEA) corner is Mark McDade, a UniServ representative who has represented teachers unions for the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA) for approximately three years. He arrived in the area about a year ago, and previously represented unions in Berks, Lehigh and Northampton counties.
In addition to Line Mountain, McDade represents 10 other district unions: Danville, Millville, Shamokin Area, Shikellamy, Warrior Run, Milton, Northumberland County Career and Technology Center (NCCTC), Southern Columbia and two unions at the Central Susquehanna Intermediate Unit.
At two of the four districts where McDade and Pratt are represented, Danville and Millville, there have been teacher strikes. And at Line Mountain, a strike date of Nov. 5 has been set.
Only Warrior Run has a contract, and it was signed in June 2013 - prior to McDade's arrival in the area.
Don't 'mesh well'
Pratt believes McDade is a common denominator in the fact that so many local contracts are unsettled. He said he's been settling contracts for 20 years while McDade has yet to settle one.
McDade counters that those negotiating contracts at Line Mountain and elsewhere in the region weren't able to settle prior to his arrival, either.
He pointed to the removal of Pratt by the Shamokin Area School District as a sign that he is not the one at fault.
"He represented Shamokin, but the board got rid of him," said McDade.
But that's not quite how it went, said Charles Shuey, chairman of the Shamokin school board's negotiating committee. He confirmed the district recently stopped using Pratt to represent the board, but it's not that Pratt was incapable of the task; it's that the negotiations were not progressing because Pratt and McDade "didn't mesh well" and the board wanted to attempt negotiating on its own.
"Mr. McDade and Mr. Pratt became so hostile that it hampered negotiations," said Shuey. "I'd like to stress that I don't blame Mr. McDade or Mr. Pratt. We also wanted the teachers to try it on their own without Mr. McDade."
He added that the teachers are opting to continue using McDade, and that if negotiations without outside representation do not go as expected, the board would bring Pratt back.
Options for representation
Troy Laudenslager, president of the Line Mountain Board of Directors, said at the Aug. 26 board meeting that their negotiating team also requested to meet with their teachers union without the presence of McDade. Laudenslager and others at Line Mountain have said McDade's public comments critical of the board and his conduct in the negotiation process have hampered progress.
Asked about Laudenslager's wish to negotiate privately the same night, McDade vehemently opposed the idea.
"The board is getting desperate and what they're doing is they're approaching our rank and file members, which is also a violation of labor law," said McDade. "The law prohibits individual bargaining with our members."
Pratt clarified that while the board is not allowed to negotiate with the local union once a state union representative is selected as negotiator, the local union may decide as a unit to forgo a state union representative at one or more negotiation meetings.
He said Bloomsburg Area School District's teachers union recently negotiated without using a state representative.
Joseph Varano, a teacher who led the Mount Carmel Area School District's union in settling its contract in November after 17 months of contentious negotiations, said he could not comment on negotiations occurring at other districts, but spoke in broad terms of the relationship between local and state teachers unions.
"PSEA is a bottom-up democratic organization that starts locally and the members make all the final decisions, not PSEA staff," said Varano. "Really, the PSEA UniServ representatives serve as guides, but PSEA members ultimately decide which direction to go and how to vote."
According to the PSEA website, Varano's team worked with PSEA UniServ representative Virginia M. Cowley. Pratt represented the district.
Open negotiations
Varano spoke about the decision to make negotiations public, which is another of McDade's criticisms of Pratt and the Line Mountain board.
"Contract negotiations do not come under Pennsylvania's Sunshine law, which means both parties can meet and bargain in private," said Varano. "The reason for that is, if bargaining was open to the public, it would become a political show and the chance of settling a contract would be very low."
But Pratt said Line Mountain's board released its contract proposals only after their opponents took their own public stance.
"The reason for that is we felt that there was a need to inform the community of what was going on due to some comments that were made publicly by the (teachers) association," said Pratt.
Line Mountain is not the only district McDade represents that has decided to go public with negotiations.
In August, Southern Columbia school board vice president Charles Porter revealed a report of the district's negotiations at a board meeting.
Carl P. Beard, a partner of Altoona-based law firm Andrews and Beard which represents the Southern Columbia board in its negotiations, said that when it came to settling the teachers contracts, the numbers would speak for themselves.
The "financially strapped" district cannot afford the salaries and benefits the teachers are demanding, said Beard.
"We can't print money," he said.
Beard said he was not having any "significant problems" with the negotiation process itself, but that he "questioned how they arrived at some of the proposals of how it would make financial sense for the school district" to pay the salary and benefit demands.
"It's not a workable proposal," he said.
What cause?
Beard said he has more than 33 years experience in bargaining for teachers unions, and has settled around 300 school contracts. On Thursday night, he settled a contract at a Harrisburg area district, as well as another about a month ago, also in the Harrisburg area, he said.
He said he has not had a strike occur at one of his districts for eight years, and prior to that another seven.
"I just see a whole lot of unrest in and around that area (Northumberland and its surrounding counties) that I don't see in other parts of Pennsylvania," said Beard. "Strikes aren't a part of the common occurrence anymore, so you just wonder, if you get a whole lot of them in a certain area, what's causing them."
He wouldn't comment about whether he's pointing the finger at McDade.
"Somebody will just have to put the pieces together on that one," he said.
No contracts settled
Pratt, meanwhile, has been openly critical of McDade's experience and success rate at settling contract negotiations.
"He has not settled any contracts at all, in his entire PSEA career," said Pratt.
Asked about the districts he represented prior to serving his current region, McDade declined to specify if he had settled any contracts.
"We were in the process of negotiating several contracts," said McDade. "I transferred in the midst of many negotiations."
In this region, McDade said he helped settle the teachers contract at NCCTC.
James F. Monaghan, administrative director of NCCTC, said that while McDade was present at the negotiation table for the completion of the contract, it would have been completed regardless of who was present, and McDade did not lead the negotiations.
"The negotiations were going along amicably. It was back-and-forth negotiations, and just coincidentally they (teachers) changed representatives," said Monaghan. "It wasn't Mr. McDade that settled the contract."
Monaghan estimated negotiations were between 80 and 85 percent complete when McDade arrived.
For McDade's part, he points to the fact that negotiations in various districts were already started when he arrived in his new region.
"Many of these contracts started prior to my arrival and none of them were resolved prior to my arrival," he said. "And that's a question that needs to be answered by the school boards."