Mayor says teachers must pay city $250,000 for strike

Woburn Mayor Scott Galvin directed the teachers union to pay $250,000 to the city as reimbursement for their week-long strike, which both sides described as a “sticking point” to hammering out an agreement.

Galvin is seeking the payment as part of a return-towork agreement, which he said guarantees that teachers “won’t face any discipline for participating in the illegal strike” and is the last step in negotiations.

“The important part is the city had costs for the strike, and those costs were in the area of $250,000,” Galvin told the Herald Saturday. “They’re not meant to be punitive, but they’re meant to reimburse the city for the cost of the illegal strike.

The city, he said, had to pay for daily police details at Woburn schools at roughly $95,000, has continued to provide lunch to students, and has incurred unplanned administrative and legal costs.

He added that being mayor includes a “fiduciary duty to make sure we get those costs back,” but that the issue was the “sticking point” that resulted in Saturday morning’s failed negotiating session.

The Woburn Teachers Association, School Committee and mayor reached a tentative agreement on financial packages for teacher and paraprofessionals on Friday night until the impasse after midnight over the requested payment, which the union described as a “ransom.”

Negotiations will resume at 12 p.m. today.

“The mayor is basically holding us hostage with $250,000,” said Eric Scarborough, a social studies teacher and secretary for the Woburn Teachers Association.

“He at the moment seems more interested in punishing teachers who stood up for their schools, who stood up for their students, than he is in terms of getting school back on and getting kids back in school.”

Scarborough said the union also took issue with what it felt was “punitive” language in the mayor’s return-to-work agreement, which left open the potential for “future litigation.”

The union said it offered to pay for any “extraordinary and reasonable costs incurred as a result of the strike,” and make donations of $15,000 apiece to the Woburn Boys and Girls Club and YMCA, and $1,000 to each elementary and middle school parent-teacher organization and the Woburn Memorial High School Scholarship Fund.

This deal was rejected by the mayor, the union said in a statement.

Galvin said there hasn’t been a teachers strike in Woburn since 1970, when he was in first grade.

He directed blame toward the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which he said is encouraging local teachers unions to go on strike as a “bargaining chip” in negotiations, pointing to recent strikes in Brookline, Haverhill and Malden.

Under state law, it is illegal for public employees to go on strike and the Woburn Teachers Association’s decision to defy a Jan. 27 Superior Court order to return to work has already resulted in roughly $90,000 in fines, according to Galvin.

The Commonwealth Employment Relations Board filed a “verified complaint and a motion for preliminary injunction” against the MTA on Thursday, ordering it to stop encouraging the strike in Woburn.

“Let the MTA pay the money,” Galvin said. “They’ve got $49 million in the bank.”

While Galvin said the strike has deprived students of an education for a week and has been “terribly disruptive for parents who work,” Scarborough said students have largely been supportive and have even joined teachers at some of the protests.

“I am hoping to be back in school on Monday,” Scarborough said. “I would love to see my students again.”