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Eagle County School District Superintendent Phil Qualman announced during the Thursday, May 28, school board meeting that negotiations with the Eagle County Education Association had reached an impasse.

The school board had been due to vote on a proposed $3 million compensation package that night, but Qualman removed the item from the agenda earlier in the week after hearing from the board that its members would not support that amount.

The negotiations, formerly broadcast to the public, will move into private rooms with a third-party mediator beginning Wednesday. According to the collective bargaining agreement, the district and the union must make “every attempt” to finalize mediated negotiations by June 30.

District backs out of previous agreement

The $3 million package was proposed by district staff and accepted by the union during a May 21 negotiations meeting. At the same meeting, the two parties agreed on other topics, including renewing the collective bargaining agreement, assembling work groups to study the salary schedule and hiring a third party to analyze district expenditures.

The $3 million compensation package was included in the district’s agreement with the union, “but frankly, I was skeptical it would pass with the board, because it’s unfair to our support staff who we cannot function without, and it required more money than the board was comfortable spending,” Qualman said.

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Qualman said he mentioned in “multiple negotiations meetings” that he did not believe the board would approve spending more than $2.5 million.

“The board members learned at our last board meeting two weeks ago that the 25-26 budget would have us spending into reserves, meaning that we would be spending $2.5 million into deficit spending, and that that pace is not sustainable for this organization into the future,” Qualman said.

Qualman said he removed the board’s vote on the negotiations package from the school board agenda ahead of the meeting “in hopes of convening the negotiations team” before the school board meeting. But the union was unable to meet on May 27, the day the district offered. “So they declared impasse,” Qualman said.

“We are saddened by the recent decision to remove the most current tentative agreement from the board’s agenda, particularly because it was a counterproposal from the district that ECEA accepted,” wrote Katie Leibig, co-president of the Eagle County Education Association and a second grade teacher at Edwards Elementary School, in an email to the Vail Daily. “This agreement was the result of months of collaboration by both bargaining teams. To see it pulled from consideration by Superintendent Qualman was both surprising and discouraging.”

School board members weighed in on their decision not to vote on the compensation package that emerged from negotiations.

“I could not in good conscience vote for a proposal that exceeded the amount we had responsibly and transparently allocated. That doesn’t mean I don’t value our educators, it means I am committed to making decisions that ensure we can keep showing up for them and for our students in the years to come,” said Gretchen Hovey, a school board member.

Qualman critiques Eagle County Education Association leadership

At the end of his report, Qualman spoke directly to the more than 40 members of the public in attendance at the school board meeting, several of whom wore Eagle County Education Association t-shirts or brought posters with slogans like, “fund our teachers like our future depends on it — because it does.”

Qualman critiqued the language the union leadership used in an email asking its members to attend the school board meeting, as well as their style of leadership and understanding of school funding.

“I hope in the coming year the association leadership will recognize we are in the same trench, facing a common enemy in a poor state funding model and a zeitgeist that would rather vilify public education than support it,” Qualman said. 

In an email to Eagle County Education Association members and district staff following the school board meeting, union leaders wrote: “It was difficult to sit through the public defamation, and while we could respond point by point, we won’t as this blame game is not productive in moving us forward.”

Qualman said that the district was following the rules of the collective bargaining agreement and making efforts to include the union on district boards.

“The email from the union claims they engaged in ‘good faith negotiations,'” Qualman said. “But the union asked for over 90% of available funds to be used for certified staff pay raises, and demanded the district spend beyond its means to the point it would jeopardize the fiscal security of this district.”

According to Leibig, the union is within its rights to ask for the funding to go to certified staff. As stated in the collective bargaining agreement, the union only negotiates on behalf of licensed staff. 

“This kind of messaging creates unnecessary tension between employee groups and distracts from the real problem: the district’s inability to offer competitive pay across the board,” Leibig wrote. “It’s deeply troubling to suggest that when educators advocate for fair compensation and professional respect, we are somehow to blame for the district’s financial challenges or accused of taking resources away from others.”

The district’s proposed salary package would have added $500 to the base teacher salary. But, according to Leibig, the district still has a ways to go to match nearby districts.

According to data provided by the Eagle County Education Association, the starting salary for a teacher in Eagle County is $50,500. In Aspen, Steamboat Springs, the Roaring Fork Valley and Summit County, teacher salaries begin at $54,000 per year or higher.

The average teacher salary for an Eagle County School District teacher is $69,159. In Steamboat Springs, teacher salaries average $72,000. In Summit County, the average teacher salary is north of $81,000.

“Despite receiving an additional $1.7 million from the state and implementing $3.4 million in staffing and operational reductions, Eagle County School District continues to lag behind neighboring districts in both starting and average teacher pay,” Leibig wrote. 

But Eagle County has funding challenges that impair the district’s ability to offer similar salaries and the district still manages to keep its turnover rate below the state average.

“Understand that other districts pay better because they passed higher mill levy overrides, and/or passed measures to collect sales tax revenue to support their schools,” Qualman said. 

“No district in the state has done more to provide affordable housing or provide such a robust net of employee assistance programming as we have at ECSD,” Qualman said. “This board has provided raises that have exceeded inflation on average every year for the last 15 years. They are doing what they can with what they’ve got.”

Both Qualman and Leibig argued in support of the next mill levy override that the district puts in front of voters.

Speaking during the meeting’s public comment section, Cherie Rollins, a third grade teacher at Edwards Elementary School sporting a union t-shirt, said it did not make sense to her that the district could both receive more funding from the state and make cuts across its departments and still not have the funds to pay teachers more.

“I just left negotiations last week so hopeful,” Rollins said. “I just don’t understand how it was presented that it was going to get a chance tonight when really, it isn’t going to get a chance tonight at all.”