By Ann Marie Shambaugh
The union representing Carmel Clay Schools teachers has received notice that it is no longer in good standing with the Indiana State Teachers Association after ISTA claimed it failed to pay dues that were deducted from teachers’ checks. Officials from the Carmel Clay Educaion Association, however, said that ISTA had been overdrawing payments for years and that the two entities have been working for months to address the situation.
ISTA, which represents nearly 40,000 Hoosier educators, recently notified CCEA members that the two organizations “have been in a dispute over the local’s failure to transmit member dues that were deducted from payroll for the 2015-16 year.” The notice from ISTA President Teresa Meredith states that ISTA found out Sept. 1 that CCEA made a stop payment order on funds that were designated for ISTA.
“Because this action of the CCEA Board threatens to deprive certain members of important rights and protections that ISTA membership affords, ISTA has been actively working to resolve this dispute with the CCEA Board. As of this date, CCEA has not communicated a response,” it states.
In a note to CCEA members, CCEA President Brian Lyday stated that “the absurdity of this letter cannot be understated” and that his organization acted to prevent ISTA from automatically withdrawing payments after an audit showed that membership numbers submitted by CCEA did not match what was in ISTA’s database and that ISTA electronically withdrew dues “in excess of what CCEA collected from its teachers.”
“ISTA’s own audit (in March) revealed it had overdrawn at least $9,484.31 from CCEA over the past few years. After nine months, ISTA remains unwilling to correct errors within its original reconciliation work that demonstrated this is a minimum amount owed,” Lyday stated. “Instead, ISTA has suspended members of our local organization and now have suspended our local as a whole.”
Lyday stated that in November ISTA offered to repay $9,484.31 to reconcile the amount it overdrew for the 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 school years but not previous years. On Dec. 6, the CCEA board of directors unanimously did not accept the offer, “given ISTA’s repeated refusal to acknowledge the reconciliation issues continually presented and clearly documented,” Lyday stated.
ISTA indicated that it will work with individual CCEA members to answer questions and provide assistance.
“We know that CCEA members on payroll deduction, who are not members of the CCEA Board, authorized and had dues deducted with the good faith expectation that the local association would transmit the state and national portions to ISTA. Consequently, ISTA will do as much as it reasonably can to prevent such members who are not members of the CCEA Board from being harmed by the actions of CCEA’s leadership,” Meredith’s note stated.
The notification comes as CCEA is awaiting a ruling from the Indiana Education Employment Relations Board on an unfair labor complaint it filed against Carmel Clay Schools. The complaint alleges the district assisted in the formation of the Carmel Teachers Association, a group seeking to replace CCEA as the teachers union in CCS. A final hearing on the complaint is set for Jan. 25, and CCS teachers have been unable to negotiate a new contract during the dispute.
“CTA has been and continues to be concerned with actions of the CCEA leadership team, the adversarial relationship CCEA has created with the CCS administration and school board, and now what also appears to be an adversarial relationship CCEA has created with ISTA,” said Jeffrey Hammond, an attorney representing CTA. “CTA believes that the best way to advance the interests of Carmel Teachers is to develop and foster cooperative and collaborative relationships, not adversarial ones.”
