The Orland School District 135 board has approved a four-year teacher contract and appointed a parent with a business background to fill a board vacancy.
Board members voted 6-0 Monday night to approve the new contract, which provides 1 percent annual pay raises and no increase in employee health insurance costs.
Bill Zopf, president of the Orland Council of Educators, declined to discuss further details of the new pact, which will run through June 2019.
“We are happy with the contract, and we were confident the board would ratify it,” Zopf, a Jerling Junior High physical education teacher, said.
The old contract expired June 30, but neither side expressed concern about negotiations extending three months into the school year.
“Any good contract takes time to go through the process,” board President Laura Berry said. “Everybody worked together.”
The 1 percent raises apply to a standard salary scale based on a teacher’s experience and educational attainment. The entry level salary, for a first-year teacher with a bachelor’s degree, is $42,801 this school year and will be $44,098 by the end of the contract.
The contract that expired June 30 had tied raises to inflationary increases in the Consumer Price Index for urban consumers, which translated to annual salary increases of between 1.5 percent to 3 percent. That contract, however, raised the employee portion of medical insurance for dependents from just 5 percent of the premium cost in 2011 to 30 percent beginning in 2013.
The new contract appears to forgo higher raises in exchange for stability in health insurance costs.
Also Monday, board members met in closed session for two hours before selecting Devin Hodge, 46, to fill the board seat vacated by former board President Joe La Margo when he resigned in September after being promoted from Orland Park’s deputy clerk to its assistant village manager.
Hodge was among four finalists whom the board interviewed in private Monday night after receiving 16 applications for the term that runs through April 2019.
“I would like to thank all four candidates for coming in. You all brought something unique,” Berry said. “It was a very difficult decision.”
Berry said Hodge’s commitment to the district stood out and his background in finance will be an asset to the board. Hodge, a business operations manager at Argonne National Laboratory, is a District 135 graduate and has three children in district schools.
The board also elected Sandra Kulak as its vice president, with Berry remaining as president.
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Patrick Guinane is a freelance reporter.