Teachers with Bourbonnais School District 53 hit the picket line Thursday after declaring a strike over salary increases and insurance and retirement benefits.
The strike was declared late Wednesday night by the Bourbonnais Education Association following more than four hours of contract negotiations with a federal mediator, and after no deal was reached with the School District 53 Board of Education, according to a statement on the district’s website.
“We did everything we could to prevent this from happening,” said Lauren Lundmark, teachers union president in District 53, which serves prekindergarten to eighth grade. “We would much rather be in our classrooms with our students, but instead we are fighting for them out on the picket line.”
The union, which represents 167 teachers, speech pathologists, psychologists and social workers, and which began contract negotiations with the school board in March 2020, has been working without a contract and has been since the beginning of the school year, Lundmark said.
The strike arrives after months of contentious negotiations, which hit an impasse in February, when the school board declined to accept a two-year contract offer proposed by the union’s bargaining team.
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At the time, union officials said the deal would cost the school district around $27,000 less than the first two years of the board’s offer.
District 53 officials said the school board addressed the last remaining issue that was preventing them from reaching an agreement with the union earlier this week by “moving to a percent-based increase for all teachers for three years.”
“We were having productive conversations that we were hopeful would result in an agreement,” District 53 officials said in a statement.
“We left the table on (Tuesday) with a proposal from the BEA seeking 11.25% in salary increases over three years,” officials said, adding that to avoid a strike, the school board increased its offer to 9.5% in salary increases “for all teachers over three years during a pandemic.”
“The BEA refused to accept the board’s offer of 9.5% salary increases over three years and informed the board team they are going on strike Thursday,” officials said.
But Lundmark with the teachers union said the school district has a roughly $10 million reserve fund that could support the teachers’ proposal.
“We are teachers. … We have done the math,” Lundmark said. “We know they have the funding to maintain our insurance and retirement benefits while also providing competitive percentage raises to our staff across the board.”
Lundmark added: “This is about investing in our students and our community, so we can continue to provide our students a high quality education for years to come.”
Bourbonnais is about 55 miles southwest of downtown Chicago.
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