By Linda Conner Lambeck

WESTPORT — Teacher salaries will go up nearly 14 percent over the next three years under a tentative agreement between the Board of Education and Westport Education Association.

With five members present, the school board agreed unanimously to accept the deal last week. The teachers’ union ratified the contract at a meeting Oct. 7, said John Bayers, the district’s assistant superintendent for human resources and general administration.

After an information session on the package with the Board of Finance and the Representative Town Meeting, the package then goes to the full RTM.

If the RTM takes no action, the contract goes into effect. If the legislative body rejects the deal, under state law, the contract would go to arbitration.

“We hope they don’t vote,” said board Chair Lee Goldstein. She said there were two Board of Finance members and RTM representatives, along with three school board members, on the contract negotiation team.

She called talks thoughtful and productive, adding, “It is a contract that will fix things in a good way.”

Union officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bayers told the school board that the contract would increase wages at all steps.

In the first year, starting in July 2025, teachers would see salaries increase 5.11 percent. In year two, salaries increase 4.65 percent, and in year three, the increase is 4.2 percent.

Under the deal, the starting salary for a teacher with a master’s degree in the first year of the contract would be $56,510. In the second year it rises to $60,642 and to $62,311 in year three.

The contract covers about 550 teachers. Over the three years, the increase will initially cost the school district nearly $8.5 million.

Over that time, however, health and dental insurance premiums will increase by 1 percent, which collectively will shave just over $1 million off the $41 million cost of benefits to the district.

That was important to the board, Bayers said.

With the insurance savings, the three-year contract cost amounts to an increase of roughly $7.5 million.

Although the contract document was not yet made public, Bayers said there were other language changes to benefit both the union and district, including a Memorandum of Understanding to assist operations in special education and address coverage when substitute teachers are not available. In those cases, teachers get stipends for covering extra classes.

The school district started the year with about a half-dozen teacher vacancies. Those have since been filled, but Bayers said a couple of new vacancies arose after the school year started. Both are special education jobs, he said.

“Westport’s salaries are attractive, but the issue we are dealing with, as well as neighboring districts, is the shortage of teachers across the state,” said Bayers. Every district, he said, is searching for talent.

Statewide there are now teacher shortages in at least nine subject areas, including special education, bilingual education, world languages, history, math, social studies, technology and school psychologists.

The new Westport teachers’ contract, if ratified, would replace a pact that between 2022-23 and this year gave teachers raises of 9.86 percent over three years.

Freelance writer Linda Conner Lambeck, a reporter for more than four decades at the Connecticut Post and other Hearst publications, is a member of the Education Writers Association.