Board OKs teacher contracts, explores shared services

The Oberlin Board of Education approved a number of contracts and explored an inter-district collaboration for shared bus maintenance services in a special session on June 13.

The Board approved the collective bargaining agreements for the city’s two teachers unions, the Oberlin Ohio Education Association and the Ohio Association of Public School Employees Local 214.

Both agreements are scheduled to go into effect on July 1 and call for 1.75 percent increases to teacher-based salaries over the three-year lifespan of the contract, which lasts until 2020.

OAPSE Local 214 members will hold a vote on June 14 to ratify the agreement.

The Board also extended a contract for food management services with Sodexo for the 2017-18 school year. The original three-year agreement reached in 2015 was set to expire at the conclusion of the 2016-17 school year.

Sodexo provides food services and school meals for Oberlin City Schools.

The Board is also exploring a shared services agreement with New London Local Schools for shared bus maintenance services. The potential agreement would be a one-year trial contract which allows the district to combine repair services on district school buses.

New London Superintendent Brad Romano presented to the Board and encouraged Oberlin to consider such a proposal which could lower cost for both districts.

New London is presently sharing bus maintenance services with Monroeville Local Schools, and Romano said his district is trying to set itself strategically up as a regional hub for smaller school districts to maintain their vehicles, lessening the reliance on local service stations.

“A lot of the smaller rural districts are using local service stations to do their fleet maintenance. At some point computers and the technology on the buses is going to put the small mom and pop shops out of business,” Romano said.

Oberlin City Schools Superintendent Dr. David Hall said the district has been exploring the issue with a number of smaller districts in the area for the past eight months as a way to explore cost savings measures, and New London is intriguing because it has the infrastructure already in place.