Schools, teachers reach a contract

Teachers in Jay Schools will be getting a 2-percent raise.

Jay School Corporation and Jay Classroom Teachers Association, in a joint statement, announced Friday that they had reached a deal on a contract for the 2018-19 school year.

JCTA voted in favor of the deal Thursday evening. It will go before Jay School board for a vote on Oct. 15.

Jay School superintendent Jeremy Gulley and JCTA president Paul Szymczak confirmed that the deal includes 2-percent raises for teachers.

Other contract changes are related to reducing positions following the closure of Judge Haynes Elementary School with those students going to the East and General Shanks elementary school buildings.

The deal also calls for a new intramural athletics program with soccer in the fall, basketball in the winter and track in the spring in place of the previous elementary basketball program. (The corporation previously had seven kindergarten through fifth grade elementary schools, but is down to four — Bloomfield, General Shanks, Redkey and Westlawn — with East as a kindergarten through second grade building.) Szymczak said the hope is that the intramural program will allow for greater participation.

Gulley and Szymczak agreed that the process toward reaching a contract agreement was a positive one. It marks the fifth consecutive negotiation that has resulted in a deal prior to the October deadline, after the 2013 process broke down and went through fact-finding and appeals all the way to the Indiana Supreme Court.

“The process this year was very well-defined because we all know exactly where we stand as a corporation financially … We know them all very well now because Mr. Gulley has gone to great lengths to make that very clear to everybody,” Szymczak said. “It indicates that the association and the corporation are really working in a cooperative way to try to make the best of what we can with where we’re at and make it better going forward.”