The Minneapolis school board and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers reached a tentative agreement on a two-year contract, averting a strike that had been set for Jan. 17.
The contract provides an average increase of $4,400, including fringe benefits. That amounts to 16.75 percent for the district’s 2,514 teachers over the life of the two-year contract.
The average salary for teachers in Minneapolis--without fringe benefits--is $26,263.
Superintendent Richard Green said a tax increase would be necessary to help pay for the settlement, which exceeded what the school board had expected to pay. The increase is likely to be a hike of six to eight million.
New York State education officials this month lifted a ban on the Yonkers Public School District’s winter sports program, saying the district had met demands for improving the enforcement of health and safety regulations.
State officials had previously ordered the district to halt its partici-pation in interscholastic sports after a state investigation into the death of a high-school football player found “endemic problems” in the administration of the district’s sports program. (See Education Week, Jan. 11, 1983.)
The director of the state education department’s division of physical education, Michael Willie, said the district would have to demonstrate on a sport-by-sport basis until the end of the year that it was providing adequate health and safety protection for student athletes.
In a related development, Justice Anthony Ferraro of the State Supreme Court in Westchester County last week ruled that the Yonkers district superintendent, Joan M. Raymond, acted properly when she reprimanded the former director of athletics, Henry Monaco. Mr. Monaco’s lawyer said he would appeal the decision.
Linking two elementary schools by video camera, computers, and teleconferencing equipment is a good idea, New Jersey Office of Equal Educational Opportunity officials told school administrators in Weehawken, but is not an acceptable desegregation plan.
Because many parents with children in the school district’s elementary schools were opposed to busing, said Francis Pizzuta, school board president, school officials developed an interactive video program to integrate the schools electronically.
“An approved desegregation plan includes a bona fide plan for the reassignment of students,” Naida Thomas, director of the state EEO, wrote in a letter to school officials recently, and unless the district develops an acceptable desegregation plan by Jan. 31., the integration question will be forwarded to the state education commissioner who has the authority to impose an integration program, Ms. Thomas said.
But school officials still believe the video program is a good plan. Richard E. Onorevole, superintendent of the Weehawken district, said he will recommend to the school board that the same plan be resubmitted on Jan. 31.
