VOLUME 1 ISSUE 2 JANUARY 2023

Your NHEA
House of Delegates

Session 1
Professional Issues
Supporting ESL/ELL
Students

PSEA House of Delegates, Dec 2-3

From the Desks of the President & Vice-President

Session 2
Dear NHEA Members, When teachers get
mindfulness
Rich and I decided to create a forum to share information with you in between Rep Council training students
meetings, so periodically we will send out a newsletter such as this one. 
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We have been busy so far this year attending district, region, and state meetings. Over the last
weekend in October, we attended the Local Presidents/Collective Bargaining Conference in
Hershey, PA. It is important to us that we share what we learn with all of you, so in addition to
some local reminders, we will include what we learned at this conference.

As always, thank you for giving us your trust. We will work hard every day to continually earn it.
Enjoy the newsletter, and contact us at vickitruchan@gmail.com or riker150@gmail.com if you
have any questions or comments.
Session 3
In Unity, House Of Delegates
Vicki & Rich Business

 VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1 NOVEMBER 2022

Take-Aways from
Professional Issues
Sessions
Session 1: What the EL? Supporting
English Learners in All Spaces
‣ We learned that under PA school code any
teacher that has ELL students in their classroom
is consider an ELL teacher.

‣ The district by law must provide professional

development to help teachers support their ELL Session 2:  ADA and FMLA (Vicki)
students.
‣ ADA

‣ Our administration can use virtual teaching for ‣ Employers have to offer reasonable accommodations
evaluations because it is in our Online MOU. for disabilities unless they can show they will face
undue hardship by doing so.

‣ Anything we create for an online class belongs to
the school district since you were paid to create
the material.
‣ If you feel you need accommodations, please do the
following:
‣ Start with a conversation with someone from your
association leadership.

‣ Your employer does have the right to send you to

their own doctor for a second opinion.

IMPORTANT REMINDERS!
• If you ever witness anything that needs to be reported to Child-line, please do NOT just
tell your administrator and expect that he or she will take care of it. Legally, you are a
mandated reporter and MUST report the incident yourself. Feel free to contact an
association leader to help you with this. Read more from PSEA HERE about this subject.
• If you are ever hurt at work (whether through an accident or purposeful injury by
another party), you need to go and see your school nurse so that the injury is
documented. Please reach out to an association leader as well so that someone is aware.
• Please register for our website!  You can find many resources and important documents
on our site, which can be found HERE.

 VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1 NOVEMBER 2022

Take-Aways from
Collective Bargaining
Conference in Hershey
Session 2:  ADA and FMLA (Vicki)
‣ ADA (con’t from previous page)

‣ Members should always have a representative with

them when discussing accommodations with
administration.  NHEA will be in contact with our
Uniserv Rep for advice. You should go into a
meeting with multiple accommodations in mind.

‣ Birth, adoption, or foster care

‣ Serious health condition

‣ Care of a child, spouse, or parent who is ill

‣ Military service

‣ What is promised to employees upon their return from

FMLA is a SIMILAR job, not their exact job. 

‣ FMLA ‣ Advice from the presenter is that associations should push

for districts to stack our sick leave WITH FMLA and not
use them concurrently.  Each district does this
‣ FMLA requires covered employers to allow eligible differently. 
employees up to 12 weeks of leave during any 12
month period. To be eligible, you must have
‣ Districts are permitted to force you to use FMLA.
worked at least 1250 hours the previous year;
these hours do NOT include PTO taken.  It is hours
actually worked. It can be taken for 1 or more of
the following reasons:

Session 2 : Compensation Awareness (Rich)

‣ Goal: Get the price of teaching to re ect the value of teaching and get all teachers
who have mastered their profession to be paid the price of teaching

‣ Ideal scale is 10 step

‣ More steps uses more of the pool of money you have to work with in
negotiations
‣ The salary matrix is the distribution of members on the salary scale
‣ More people at the top gives us an opportunity to compact the scale
‣ Large BUMP steps make a salary scale unhealthy.
‣ Smoothing out BUMP steps helps shorten the scale

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 VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1 NOVEMBER 2022

Take-Aways from
Collective Bargaining
Conference in Hershey
Session 3: Salary Scale Repair (Vicki &
Rich)
‣ The goal of a salary schedule is to get the price of teaching
to re ect the value of teaching and to get all teachers who
have mastered their profession to be paid the price of
teaching

‣ Our salaries need to beat in ation.  You may not be beating

in ation every year, but over the course of your career, you ‣ We can get larger on-scale raises if we have smaller incremental
are. costs

‣ Salaries scales are better at beating in ation over a career
than just getting a COLA (cost of living adjustment) raise
‣ Bump steps result in high incremental costs
‣ Incremental cost is the amount to move from one step to the
next
‣ High incremental costs make it dif cult to give on-step raises
‣ Many salary scale xes take multiple contracts and some
sacri ce from members.

If salary schedules and

compensation interest you,
join the Compensation
Committee! Email Rich for
committee meeting details!

FOLLOW US!

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