The time has come again — Lexington teachers have started negotiating the terms of their next contracts with the town’s School Committee.
This time around, it isn’t just classroom teachers or paraprofessionals bargaining. The three main units of the Lexington Educators Association, or LEA, are negotiating at the same time — that’s about 1,200 employees.
LexObserver spoke with Avon Lewis, the chair of LEA’s bargaining team, to learn what the contract negotiation process is like and what union members are looking for in their next contracts.
The main takeaway? Everyone wants higher pay.
“The single biggest concern our membership has is around compensation, which is, of course, no surprise, given the larger economy,” Lewis said.
LEA units’ contracts usually expire every three years. This year, all of the units are negotiating at the same time, which Lewis said is “unusual.” Unit C just ratified new contract terms in June, but that was after over a year of negotiating, so their contracts are already up again soon.
There are three main Units — Unit A, which includes licensed staff such as regular and special education teachers, nurses, counselors, librarians, technology integration specialists, social workers, psychologists, speech and language pathologists, occupational therapists, and curriculum leaders; Unit C, which includes specialized instructional assistants, often called paraprofessionals or ‘paras,’ who work one-on-one with students who have disabilities or behavioral issues; and Unit D, which includes administrative assistants, secretaries, clerks, student support personnel, and registrars. (There used to be a Unit B, which was for administrators, but it branched off years ago and became its own union called the Association of Lexington Administrators).
The LEA workers who are up for new contracts want increased pay more than anything else. The main reason for this is because what’s often referred to as the ‘teacher pay penalty’ reached a record high last year, a report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, or CEPR, shows.
The teacher pay penalty refers to the pay gap between public school teachers and professionals in other fields who have the same level of education. For context, you must have or be working toward earning a Master’s degree to be a public school teacher in Massachusetts. Some teachers, including Lewis, have Ph.D. degrees, too.
The gap between weekly teacher wages and wages for other professionals grew to a record 26.9 percent in 2024 (the study looks at weekly rather than annual pay to account for the “summers off” issue that affects teachers but not other college graduates). That gap stood at 6.1 percent in 1996. Most of the growth has come from increased earnings in other professions, while teacher wages have stayed pretty stagnant.
On average, teachers made 73 cents for every dollar earned by similar professionals in 2024. CEPR’s inflation-adjusted figures show the weekly wages of teachers dropped by $46.39 over the last decade, but increased for other college graduates by $220.46.
LEA is specifically asking for employees under Units A, C, and D to get a $9,400 increase in pay in the 2026 to 2027 school year, then a $9,870 increase in 2027 to 2028, and a $10,364 increase in 2028 to 2029.
“Our single biggest proposal is a market adjustment on pay. The goal is to get our lowest paid members up to a living wage and we want to keep the top of our pay scale competitive with the median wage in Middlesex county,” Lewis said. A little over half of LEA members live in Middlesex county, she estimated.
Lewis noted that by keeping wages competitive, retention rates will increase, which means skilled and experienced workers will stay in Lexington.
“We believe the top of our pay scale should be in the range of what median income is around here so people aren’t looking at teaching and going, ‘well, I could teach or I could do pretty much the exact same thing [in a corporate position] and make $50,000 more per year. It’s asking a lot of people to say, ‘I’m going to choose to be poor so I can teach students,’” Lewis argued.
Asking for higher pay for about 1,200 employees is no small feat. LEA is the biggest union in town and Lexington Public Schools employees’ compensation already makes up about 40 percent of the town’s annual budget. In Fiscal Year 2026, Lexington’s general fund operating budget was $312,251,035 — $127,183,816 of which is budgeted for LPS salaries. That includes LPS administration, however, some of whom aren’t LEA union members and often are paid more than Unit A, C, and D employees.
Increased pay was also a priority for LEA union members in previous years, but alongside other requests, too. This year, better compensation is far and beyond everyone’s primary need.
Because the three units are negotiating for contract improvements at the same time and pretty much all employees in those units have the same, if not similar, working environments, LEA’s negotiation team is asking for many of the same items on all three units’ contracts.
“With some things, like bereavement leave for example, there’s really not a reason for bereavement leave to be different from one unit to another,” Lewis said. “This can help reduce the tension of pitting one unit against another — really all of us have the same working conditions.”
Right now and over the next few weeks, LEA’s negotiation team and the School Committee’s negotiation team are presenting their respective proposals, meaning they are telling each other what they want to see in these next contracts. Lewis expects to be done with that phase of the negotiation timeline by the end of January. Then the two negotiation teams go back and forth until they find a middle ground to settle on. Next, a formal presentation on the decided terms of the new contracts is given to the LEA members and the School Committee. Then both sides have to independently vote to ratify the new contracts.
If everything goes smoothly and there isn’t much back-and-forth, the new contracts can be ratified as soon as the end of the school year, realistically.
“That would be ideal and we’d love to see that happen,” Lewis said.
Or, it can take as long as it needs to.
Last year, Unit C finished up negotiations after over a year of back-and-forth between LEA and the School Committee. They ended up getting retroactive pay for the time they were working under expired contracts. That isn’t guaranteed, however. If negotiations take a long time again, the LEA will have to negotiate for backpay.
The LEA bargaining team’s next meeting is slated for Jan. 7. The full calendar of upcoming meetings can be found here.
Perhaps the reason for relatively flat pay of educators is that it correlates with the outcomes they are producing? Test scores have been flat or declining. Where’s the equivalent of a productivity increase that leads to higher wages, as in industries that thrive? Just saying…
The timing of this negotiation, and the gall to ask for millions more from Lexington taxpayers who just foolishly chose to spend almost a billion dollars of other people’s money is infuriating.
This is another good reason that long time residents are planning their escape from the spending frenzy called Town of Lexington.
I will say the quiet part out loud. All teachers, including Lexington teachers, work less than 190 days per year. Every other full time job is 260 days per year. 25% less days equals 25% less pay. If you want to get paid the same amount as other workers with a masters degree, then supplement your income with another job in the summer.
Teachers do amazing things. But like any other career choice, they know what the pay is going in. Less pay for summers off is the trade off they sign up for. The Select Board has already spent all of Lexington tax revenue. There is nothing more to give.