EDUCATION

Coneglio said he will begin reviewing the district’s budget and the teachers’ contract “and make the district understand that we are valuable, that we need to be treated with respect.”

The defeat likely is related to an unpopular contract that the union negotiated with the Columbus Board of Education last year.

“It comes back to the basics of what unions do,” Coneglio said. “It’s working conditions. It affects the children. They (teachers) want some of these things fixed.”

“It wasn’t even close,” Felix Catheline, a third candidate who ran for the post, said of the election. He called Johnson’s sudden defeat “shocking.”

Catheline described Coneglio’s platform as: “Let’s get back to basics. Let’s get aggressive with the

school district. It’s time to stand up for ourselves.’’

“He is going to be someone who’s really going to be getting in the face of our Board of Education,” Catheline said.

Coneglio is an 18-year veteran of the district who lives in Clinton Township and has served as a township trustee. Clinton Township is served by Columbus City Schools, and Coneglio has a daughter in a district school.

Teachers are in the middle of a two-year contract and negotiations probably will reopen later this year. Asked if the West Virginia statewide teachers strike, which resulted in 5 percent teacher pay raises earlier this month, had inspired teachers to seek a get-tough leader, Coneglio said: “I don’t want to talk about a strike. Most of the members don’t even know I’m elected yet.”

And he isn’t elected yet, at least not officially. Although he said the unofficial count showed him getting 55 percent of the vote, with 50 percent

needed to avoid a runoff in the three-way race, the union’s board still needs to certify the election. But he is confident he will take over in June.

“President Johnson reached out to me late (Wednesday) to let me know the outcome of the election,” school board President Gary Baker said, adding that he “thanked her for her service.’’

“I’m sure whoever is president of the CEA will work with the board, the district, to maintain a good relationship,” Baker said.

Last fall, the union ratified a two-year “final offer” contract from the school board that gave raises of 1.5 percent the first year and 1 percent the next. Members were visibly upset in September as they streamed out of the mass meeting at the Ohio State Fairgrounds. The vote was 63.4 percent for approval, which was the lowest in decades, and the meeting was attended by 2,100 educators, double the number who typically vote.

“The members felt disrespected by the board with their offer,” Johnson said after that meeting, adding that the union took a vote of no-confidence in the school board.But even though the district was labeling the deal a final offer, Coneglio said he would have returned to the bargaining table.

“There is no ‘final offer,’” he said Thursday. “You keep negotiating.”

Rhonda Johnson, who was CEA president before Tracey Johnson, who is no relation, said to her knowledge no incumbent CEA president has lost an election, at least dating back to the early 1970s.

“I don’t question her work ethic,” Catheline said of Tracey Johnson. “I never did. Our union had just gotten to the point where we were focused on so many things state and national.

“She was just spread out in so many different ways.”