Pictured, from left, during last week’s budget meeting in Snow Hill were Commissioners Caryn Abbott, Joe Mitrecic, Jim Bunting, Ted Elder, Eric Fiori, Diana Purnell and Chip Bertino.

By Brian Shane, Staff Writer

and Stewart Dobson, Editor

The president of the Worcester County Commissioners reportedly offered a $3,000 pay raise for teachers to the teachers association president two weeks ago provided she would end salary negotiations with the board of education.

Worcester County Teachers Association President Beth Shockley-Lynch turned down the offer that included identical raises for school support staff, sheriff’s deputies and other county employees on the basis that she was not authorized to agree to anything without her membership’s knowledge and consent.

Shockley-Lynch did not identify the commissioner she met with over lunch on May 23 at the Atlantic Hotel in Berlin, but this week commissioner President Ted Elder acknowledged that it was he.

The session between the two followed the commissioners’ decision days earlier to raise teachers’ pay to $2,000 instead of to the $4,000 raise agreed to during negotiations between the board of education and the association.

The $4,000 raise the board agreed to was part of its multi-year plan to comply with a statewide legislative mandate, the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, to set the starting salary for teachers at $60,000 by the 2027-28 school year.

Worcester’s current first-year teacher salary of $52,789 is the lowest among Maryland’s 24 public school districts.

In separate negotiations, the school board approved a $2,000 raise for  the public school system’s support staff.

But some commissioners, including Elder, objected to giving teachers double the support staff raises, and decided to fund raises equally — even though the commissioners have no control over who gets paid what in the public school system. Their authority is over the overall budget, not its parts.

Nevertheless, the off-the-books proposal  was presented to Shockley-Lynch, as Commissioner Caryn Abbott revealed in a May 30 Facebook exchange with a critic of the commissioners’ school funding decisions.

In her response, Abbott disclosed that the teachers had turned down a $3,000 increase, although there was no record of such a deal having been offered in public.

“By the way,” she wrote, “all of the employees could’ve gotten $3,000 but the teachers union rejected that so maybe you can thank them.”

Shockley-Lynch, however, said accepting or rejecting the deal wasn’t her call to make and that she told the commissioner she met with, presumably Elder, that the offer would have to be voted on by the full Worcester County Teacher’s Association membership, and then presented to the school board. Accepting any kind of offer outside of negotiations, she said, would violate collective bargaining laws.

“When I explained I did not have the authority agree to this offer, and I would consult with my legal counsel, I was told, ‘that’s the offer, take it or leave it.’ I would need to put it in writing before Wednesday, May 28th at 12:00, when the commissioners meet again. If I did not take it, all departments (county employees, school support staff and sheriff’s deputies) would be cut to $2,500,” she said.

Who invited whom to lunch is unclear. Elder said Tuesday the teacher’s association reached out to him, while Shockley-Lynch said he invited her.

 As for presenting a take-it-or-leave it offer, Elder said Tuesday he mentioned to Shockley-Lynch the possibility that the commissioners might consider amending their budget considerations to fund a $3,000 across-the-board teacher raise instead of just $2,000.

“I did ask her if she would, you know, if she could get the teachers to meet in the middle,” Elder told OC Today-Dispatch. “And, of course there was discussions that they can’t legally do that, I don’t think. That’s about where it went and that I had a nice meal with her and that was it.

“I did mention that figure,” Elder said. “I said, ‘I can’t promise, but I think if we could, if you would settle for something like that, I think I could get the votes.’ That’s just what I said. … I mean, it was a suggestion, that I may be able to get that. But I can’t promise them anything and I made sure they knew that.”

Elder also said he issued no ultimatums, “because I can’t – I have no control over the what the board does, and I have no control over what the teacher’s association does. I just I asked for something, and she said they can’t do it. That’s it.”

Shockley-Lynch, however, said, “The offer from a commissioner was that they felt there were four votes for the teachers, support staff, bus driver, county employees, and the sheriff’s department to get a $3,000 salary adjustment if the teacher’s association agreed not to go back and renegotiate for our original agreement of $4,000.”

Elder added that he’s met often with board of education members as both sides attempt to reach a compromise to fund the school system’s $115 million budget request.

Reactions were mixed when the commissioners met Tuesday to cast their final budget vote.

Commissioner Joe Mitrecic (District 7, Ocean City) said he’d first heard about the lunch by reading about it on this newspaper’s website and not from his peers on the dais, calling such a meeting “highly irregular.”

“We don’t set the teacher’s salaries,” he said. “I think it was wrong that it even happened, let alone there was a deal trying to be struck that didn’t include the rest of the commissioners. I would hope that in the future, this type of situation doesn’t occur.”

Commissioner Eric Fiori (District 3, Sinepuxent) credited school officials for working to comply with the commissioners’ line-item budget requests.

“And in return, what do we do?” he asked. “Have a backdoor meeting for $3,000 for a raise to try to leverage things?”

Abbott (District 1, Southern) then asked Fiori, “how many meetings have you had with the board of education and others that we’ve never been told about?

“I think we all can do better and certainly communicating amongst all of us is the proper way to do things,” she said.

Mitrecic interjected that the commissioners’ job is to confer with the school board, not the teachers’ union. “So, you can’t compare the two,” he said to Abbott.

In her responses to Abbott’s Facebook comment, Shockley-Lynch said, “Unfortunately, Commissioner Abbott does not understand how collective-bargaining works. A Friday afternoon last-minute offer to the teachers association is not the process in which collective bargaining works. The offer was not taken to the Board of Education. We do not negotiate with the commissioners; we only negotiate with the Board of Education. Obviously, they had the funds to offer an increase of $3,000 but chose not to do it.”