NEW HAVEN, Conn. – The Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now, also known as ConnCAN, has introduced a new online database that offers citizens specific information about teachers union contracts for nearly every school district in the state.

The organization launched the database last week in an effort to “help facilitate effective local and statewide decision-making.”

In other words, the group wants the public to learn about the huge sums of money schools  spend on union labor through various provisions in collective bargaining agreements. They want to start a discussion about the best and most effective use of financial resources in cash-strapped school districts.

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With money scarce, should dollars be trimmed from labor contracts to spend on students? The public can’t answer that question unless it knows how much the union contracts typically cost.

Here’s a clue for the public: School districts generally spent about 80 percent of their general fund dollars on expenses tied to teachers union contracts, according to Patrick Riccards, chief executive officer for ConnCAN.

“Far too often, we think of teachers’ compensation in solely terms of salaries,” Riccards told EAGnews.org. “There is far more to it, far more moving pieces than anyone had perceived.”

The database analyzes over 170 collective bargaining agreements throughout Connecticut.  Users can compare their school district to neighboring districts, to see how their teachers’ pay, benefits and work rules stack up.

“For far too long, we haven’t known what has gone into these contracts. We’ve just expected them to make sense,” Riccards said. The teacher contract database “is the ultimate tool for transparency,” he said.

Disclosing the details 

We at EAGnews.org understand that need for teacher contract transparency. We’ve studied hundreds of collective bargaining agreements from districts around the nation and discovered incredibly wasteful provisions along the way.

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We’ve found contract provisions that force schools to pay teachers extra money to monitor lunchrooms, cover for absent colleagues or have an extra child or two in their classrooms. Many districts pay hundreds of millions of dollars for employee health insurance and pensions, with no contributions from employees.

There are seniority bonuses, retirement bonuses and National Board Certification bonuses. There are attendance incentive programs and payoffs for unused sick days. There are generous sick and personal day policies that drive up substitute teacher costs. There are full salaries and benefits for union officers who never step foot in a classroom.

There are automatic, annual salary increases for nearly all teachers. One district even has a special fund that pays personal legal bills for teachers.

The list goes on and on, and the expenses add up.

The ConnCAN database does not address all of the costs listed above. But there is a lot of useful information to give interested citizens a taste of how their local union contract affects school spending and operations.

For instance, its analysis of the New Haven union contract examines the number of teaching days required, the length of the work day for teachers, class size limits, teacher salary ranges, whether the district offers performance bonuses, whether it offers college tuition reimbursement for teachers, the number of paid sick and personal days allowed, and how the teacher evaluation and layoff systems work.

It’s certainly a good place to start for Connecticut residents who want to learn more about the relationship between Big Labor and public schools.

Citizens need information right now

It’s not always easy for citizens to learn about the effects of school collective bargaining on their own.

For starters, union contract language is usually quite murky, written by and for education professionals with the help of friendly attorneys. The ordinary citizens who pay the bills can find it difficult to understand the wording.

Accessibility can also be challenging.

While collective bargaining agreements are open to the public under state law, unions and administrators don’t like it when people go digging for answers. As a result, school districts can be slow to respond and may require multiple follow-ups.

“Contracts are available to the public if they know how to go about requesting them… [But] it can take a great deal of prodding for districts to produce what is supposedly public information,” Riccards said.

Some districts try to circumvent the law by requesting fees to fill information requests. Sometimes the fees are nominal, and sometimes they’re absurd.

Last month, the Prince William County School District in Virginia was seeking $40,000 to process the district’s credit card statements, cell phone bills, and check registry. It’s an effective strategy for school districts that want to limit citizen access to financial information, or at least  slow the process down.

But citizens of Connecticut need answers right now, because many collective bargaining agreements in districts around the state expired last month, and new pacts are being negotiated. Many school boards will be looking for ways to cut costs and maintain viable student programs, while the unions (as always) will be plotting to gain higher wages and more expensive benefits.

While a few districts are trying to negotiate wage freezes for the first year of the new contracts, only 36 percent of school districts had a wage freeze in 2011-2012, according to ConnCAN.

Without spending limits in the new set of contracts, more teachers may be facing layoffs in the coming years. Layoffs often increase class sizes, and effect the quality of teachers remaining in the classrooms.

As ConnCAN acknowledges, nearly all districts follow the union-preferred policy of “last in, first out” during layoffs. That means longevity trumps competence when it’s time to decide who stays and who goes.

“It would be laughable if it weren’t so frightening. Some school districts are making decisions about teacher layoffs based on a coin flip,” Riccards said. In order to for educational reforms to make true headway, “we have to do better with the same resources.”

And that starts with cutting the fat from collective bargaining agreements.

The database can be found online at http://e2.ma/click/g4mic/g4ivve/wkq0y.