Dedham Public Schools teachers and school officials reached a tentative contract agreement on Sunday afternoon, ending a teachers’ strike that began on Friday and came after nearly two years of contract negotiations.
All seven schools in the Dedham district were closed Friday when about 280 teachers, school nurses and counselors went on strike to protest their unresolved labor contract. It was Massachusetts’ first teachers’ strike in 12 years — and part of a larger trend of more frequent labor strikes among public employees across the country.
The two sides spent more than 15 hours negotiating over the weekend and ended talks at about 3 p.m. Sunday afternoon. All Dedham public schools will reopen on Monday.
“The talks ended up great. We’re feeling really, really good,” said Rachel Dudley, chairperson of the Dedham Education Association’s bargaining team. “We feel like all of our concerns were heard and really dealt with in a thoughtful way. We feel like the [School] Committee has done really meaningful work on a journey towards a new kind of path for Dedham Public Schools.”
Dudley said the union and school officials found compromise on everything they set out to resolve. The major issues on the table were health care benefits, teacher compensation, school policy towards students’ cell phone use in the classroom, and the sexual harassment policy, she said.
“We kept our focus on doing what had to be done to get our students back into their classrooms,” said Dedham Schools Superintendent Michael Welch in a statement. “We believe this agreement will fairly compensate our excellent educators while keeping our district on a positive path, with innovative policies that ensure a safe and supportive working environment, as well as budgets that are sustainable over time.”
The tentative agreement reached Sunday will be the subject of a ratification vote Monday at 4 p.m. at the American Legion Hall in Dedham. It will then require an approval vote by the Dedham School Committee.
Rallies over the weekend garnered support from across Dedham and the Boston-area community, drawing crowds of hundreds. Other local education unions, members of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, and local Teamsters voiced support for the Dedham teachers, as well as U.S. Reps. Joe Kennedy III and Ayanna Pressley and U.S. Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren.
The Dedham teacher’s strike is part of a larger national trend of more frequent strike actions, particularly by teachers and other public employees, according to Thomas Kochan, co-director of the MIT Sloan Institute for Work and Employment Research.
“Teachers are feeling the frustration of having tighter budgets and what they view as lack of respect, both for them as professionals and for the need to support public education,” Kochan said.
2018 saw the most workers engaging in work stoppages since 1986 — close to half a million people — according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. More than 90 percent of the workers striking were in the education, health care and social assistance industries.
Kochan said that trend is continuing. Early in 2019, teachers in Los Angeles, the second largest public school district in the country, went on strike for a week. Currently, tens of thousands of teachers are striking in Chicago, the nation’s third largest school district, where school has been canceled since Oct. 17.
The most recent teachers’ strike in Massachusetts before Dedham was in 2007, when 890 Quincy public school teachers went on strike for four days, temporarily closing the district’s 19 schools. That agreement raised teacher salaries and improved their health care benefits.
Kochan said he wouldn’t be surprised to see more actions from other school districts in Massachusetts.
“I think there is unrest among teachers across the state,” said Kochan. “They have not done as well as they believe they ought to, given the health of the Massachusetts economy.”
