The Somerville Educators Union ratified a contract June 23, ushering in landmark paraprofessional wages and parental leave. The contract also aims to mitigate educators’ overflowing workloads, drawing promises from the district to reevaluate Somerville’s school choice policy and implementing a co-teaching pilot program and a new workload model for special education staff.
As Somerville educators, along with workers around the country, struggled through recent bouts of inflation, the lowest-paid SEU members were hit the hardest, union president Dayshawn Simmons said. The contract brings Somerville Public Schools paraprofessionals’ pay to $50,000 a year, doubling the wages they made six years ago. This number, which towers over the $31,640-a-year starting salary of Cambridge Public Schools paraprofessionals, could make SEU a beacon for its fellow unions.
Simmons described this salary raise as “life-changing” for paraprofessionals. It could allow many to drop one of their extra jobs – though some hold four or five jobs total, he said.
The parental-leave provisions in the new contract also set Somerville educators’ benefits above counterparts in Massachusetts. By the third year of the contract, the district pays fully for parental leave; educators will no longer need to use their own sick time to care for newborns or newly adopted children, a benefit Simmons called “unheard of.”
SEU already had some of the best parental leave in the state going into this round of bargaining, Simmons said, and the district “really met” the union on improving the policies further.
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Somerville’s parental leave policies are “now a model for other communities,” School Committee chair Ilana Krepchin said in an email to Cambridge Day.
Coming with these pay-related wins is a 12 percent cost-of-living increase for teachers, social workers, deans and other union members whose jobs require a Department of Elementary and Secondary Education license. An increase of this extent is “an absolute game changer” that stands out in the current economy, Simmons said.
In negotiations, the district agreed to review its school choice policy, which allows families to decide which school their children attend. The policy has created some inequities, Simmons said. For instance, some kindergarten educators teach a dozen students, while others teach 25. To Simmons, it should not be the case that “being a kindergarten teacher in one building means something different than in another.”
Union goals in having the district review this policy include lowering class sizes to increase academic achievement.
The contract sets the foundation for a model in which a general education staff member and a special education staff member co-teach. The need for an extra educator in classrooms “comes from our educators being asked to do the job of seven,” Simmons said. He added that this model should cap educator workloads, saying that this is needed in “classrooms with high numbers, with such high need that our educators are constantly making the decision ’who am I not going to serve today? Who will not get my full attention?’”
Before scaling up the costly practice of giving classrooms an extra teacher, the district will run a pilot inclusion model for targeted grade levels at the East Somerville Community School and Winter Hill Community Innovation School, which is placed at the Edgerly Education Center since the closing of the Winter Hill campus. In addition, a working group will research and analyze best co-teaching practices.
The contract establishes weighted caseloads and workload limits for special educators too. Often doing work disproportionate to the number of students to whom they are assigned, special education staff “have become overrun,” Simmons said.
Other contract highlights include protecting students and families from hostile immigration actions in schools, a goal the union and school district shared.
The provision “is particularly transformative for a lot of our families, reaffirming that school can be a safe space for them,” Simmons said.
“Everyone on this team wanted what was best for the kids, and we wanted to codify as many of those best practices as we could in the contract,” Simmons added. “We couldn’t get all of them, but we’re able to get some really good things, and we are super pumped to see how this plays out in hopefully allowing our students more of an opportunity to achieve.”
The contract goes into effect Sept. 1 and runs through Aug. 31, 2028. Several provisions kick in during year two or three of the contract, which gives “the city and the district a little bit of time to figure out how they’re going to fund all of it,” Simmons said.
Mayor Katjana Ballantyne’s administration “set aside $1.5 million for a new Somerville Educators Union contract that has achieved its intended purpose and will now be folded into the FY26 budget,” contributing to the overall 7.4 percent increase in the School Department allocation,” the mayor said in a quote forwarded to Cambridge Day. Simmons described this $1.5 million as being squeezed out as a result of union pressure, including a rally May 7.
Representatives of Somerville Public Schools did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
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