Teachers on strike in Bourbonnais say they ‘stepped up’ during the pandemic and now are fighting higher health insurance costs

After a marathon evening bargaining session failed to yield a deal, elementary schoolteachers in Bourbonnais were back on the picket line and schools remained shuttered Wednesday on day five of a strike over salary increases and benefits.

While the seven-hour bargaining session Tuesday night between the Bourbonnais Education Association and the School District 53 Board of Education stalled around midnight, the two groups are slated to meet again at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, union officials said.

“The board continues to push to make cuts to insurance for new teachers and potentially for current teachers as well,” association President Lauren Lundmark said.

“It is unfathomable they would even be considering cutting health insurance during a global pandemic,” Lundmark said, adding: “Our educators stepped up when our community needed us most. We are the ones in our buildings working with students and at the front of our classrooms teaching our students in person.”

Expressing disappointment that the bargaining teams were unable to forge a deal, school officials said in a statement posted on the district’s website late Tuesday, “Unfortunately, we were unsuccessful and all schools will remain closed (Wednesday) due to the strike.”

While officials said they were able to make progress on some aspects of the deal, a tentative agreement could not be reached because the two groups “remain apart on the amount of the board’s contribution toward insurance for future employees.”

“The board’s proposal would put the district’s benefit package for future employees more in line with the market and still higher than most other area school districts,” school board officials said.

The board’s insurance proposal “will have zero financial impact on our current teachers,” officials said.

But Lundmark said that, in order to reach a deal as quickly as possible that would bring students back into classrooms, educators offered “to take smaller salary increases and even made concessions on our health insurance.”

“We won’t stop fighting for our students and will continue to push for a contract that’s in the best interest of students, staff and community,” Lundmark said.

The strike was declared on March 3 after, according to school board officials, the union rejected an offer of 9.5% salary increases over three years for all teachers; boosts in retirement benefits and no change in insurance benefits for current teachers.

The strike arrived after months of negotiations that stalled in February, when the school board declined to accept a two-year contract offer proposed by the union’s bargaining team.

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.

With the teachers union asking for 11.25% in salary increases over three years, district officials said last week 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.”

But Lundmark said the school district has a roughly $10 million reserve fund that could support the teachers’ proposal.

Teachers are also opposed to proposed reductions in some of their benefits, including a school board plan that would feature a “two-tier insurance system,” with a steep increase in costs for new hires.

“If a new teacher can be offered better benefits and a better salary at a neighboring school district, what would make them choose Bourbonnais?” Lundmark said.

District 53 teachers are especially disheartened that the school board is declining the union’s salary and benefits proposal, Lundmark said, given that unlike many districts across suburban Chicago, Bourbonnais teachers were back in the classroom with students for in-person instruction at the start of the 2020-21 school year.

“We’ve been in person since Day 1, working so hard, even with all of the restrictions,” Lundmark said.

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The union, which represents 167 teachers, speech pathologists, psychologists and social workers, has been working without a contract since the beginning of the school year, Lundmark said.

District 53, about 55 miles southwest of downtown Chicago, enrolls more than 2,400 students in prekindergarten through eighth grade at five schools.

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