MOUNTAIN TOP — The Crestwood School District’s support staff will be on strike on Monday morning, according to John Chupka, union president.
At Crestwood, the support staff union is a branch of the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA). It includes cafeteria workers, custodians, maintenance workers, the information technology (IT) department and paraprofessionals. 111 employees in those departments will head to the picket line from 7 to 9 a.m. Monday, leaving a severe gap in critical student services at the district’s four schools.
The Crestwood School District includes three buildings and four schools in total. Crestwood High School and Crestwood Middle School, collectively known as the secondary campus, are under the same roof at 281 South Mountain Boulevard in Wright Township. Fairview and Rice elementary schools, housing kindergarten through sixth grade classrooms, also lie within the district’s borders.
Chupka said the reasons for the strike are a combination of benefit and compensation issues stemming from contract negotiations that began in January. The union’s previous contract with the district expired over a month ago on June 30. Chupka said that the negotiation sessions themselves were not necessarily contentious and included the presence of a select number of district administrators.
Those negotiating administrators included human resources professional and solicitor Jack Dean, school board member Richard Nardone, and superintendent Natasha Milazzo.
Chupka suspected that the district will struggle mightily to serve students after a day or two without the support staff. Specifically, he noted the one-on-one attention paraprofessionals provide to students who struggle with their classwork during the regular school day.
Chupka said the absence of the cafeteria staff will be difficult to overcome. He said the district is prepared to serve children peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the interim but doubted whether the staff on hand will be able to keep up with the demand required by the entire student population.
Chupka added that, without the district’s maintenance workers, administrators will need to change school garbage cans. In a sign of solidarity, Chupka, himself a district maintenance worker, said that members of the teachers’ union will refrain from doing the work of their support staff counterparts while the strike is active.
In addition, Chupka stated that the union is prepared to file an unfair labor practice charge if, for example, the district were to hire a cleaning company during the strike.
The Crestwood support staff most recently voted for a strike in the spring of 2009. That ended after five days when former Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas Judge Peter Paul Olszewski demanded that union members and the district come to a new contract agreement.
The Crestwood School District serves the boroughs of Nuangola, Penn Lake Park and White Haven, and the townships of Dennison, Dorrance, Fairview, Rice, Slocum and Wright.
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