Around 60 people with the school district’s largest labor union gathered before Tuesday’s meeting of the Cambridge School Committee for higher wages amid ongoing contract negotiations.
Members of the Cambridge Education Association (CEA) rallied outside of the Dr. Henrietta Attles Meeting Room before the School Committee meeting, then formed a standing-room only presence at the meeting. During public comment, eight people made statements in support of higher wages. At one point, more than a dozen union members walked around the committee table and delivered over 1,000 postcards to committee members, over the objections of the School Committee Chair, David Weinstein.
“Those postcards represent the people who could not be here, because they need to make sure their bills are paid, so today we are walking into the school committee room to make a demand,” Banke Oluwole, the CEA’s vice president of community relations, had said at the rally.
Weinstein asked that postcards be delivered to the committee’s secretary, but union members continued to distribute stacks of postcards.
The CEA, which represents around 1,500 employees of the district, has been in active contract negotiations with the School Committee across five bargaining units, or groups of employees, since early this year. Those bargaining sessions are private, but contracts will become public when finalized.
The union’s previous three-year contracts with the district are set to expire before the beginning of the next school year. The union protested with similar concerns at the start of previous contract negotiations in 2023.
Many union members at the rally spoke to “sub-living wages” and “poverty wages” across the district for Education Support Professionals, or ESPs, a category that includes paraprofessionals and clerks among other non-teaching school staff.
The annual starting salary for a paraprofessional in the district range between $26,214 and $38,990 for a 6.5 hour workday, the Harvard Crimson reported in 2024.
“The school committee is proposing 2 percent cost-of-living adjustments for all 1,500 CEA members, which would leave hundreds of educators still earning less than $40,000 for full-time positions by 2029,” the union wrote in a press release for the rally.
The committee approved a $293 million school district budget for the new fiscal year in April, the largest category of which is personnel investment.
Some union members criticized the timeline of negotiations at the rally, arguing that bargaining sessions with the committee were delayed and expressing a desire to complete negotiations before the summer.
The union said its final bargaining session with the committee will be on June 24, and it expects contracts will be finalized before the end of the summer.
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