Finally.

After a strike and more than a month of trying to renegotiate terms of the contract the teachers overwhelmingly ratified, the union co-presidents for Huntley’s teachers signed the contract.

Not that Julie Hunter and Kim Aschenback really wanted to.

In fact they had refused to tell the board when they would sign the contract.

So the Board had to get firm.

Here’s the contract that we are going to implement (with all of the i’s dotted and t’s crossed), please sign by end of day Wednesday.

It was a “please sign” or face possible legal action.

Obviously the local union leaders couldn’t get support of the IEA to legally defend their “let’s keep negotiating” position.

It’s tough for even an IEA lawyer to successfully argue how, with IEA professional negotiators on the Huntley teachers’ team, they didn’t know what they were agreeing to in writing with the Board of Education.

Hunter and Aschenbach blinked.

Of course, this was after they cost taxpayers more money in legal fees for the past month.

It’s doubtful that Hunter, a Wonder Lake resident, cares very much how much money she costs District 158 taxpayers.

Obviously the “Chief Negotiator,” as the union liked referring to board member Larry Snow in its press release, was likely not in any mood for a contract do over, a phrase common in teaching circles.

And Snow had support of the board, Superintendent John Burkey and Lauren Smith, HR Director.

Lore has it that the Woodstock teachers weren’t happy with the IEA professional negotiators many years back and voted out the IEA as their bargaining agent. Woodstock District 200 teachers are now representative by the Illinois Federation of Teachers.

If you are a Huntley teacher paying $600 per year in union dues–$1,800 over 3 years–would you want better results than an, oops, why did we agree to that?

And that?

And that?

The word on the street is the IEA Region 54 negotiator Susan Goudreau was a newbie, with this being her first IEA contract to negotiate.

What’s humorous in a way is how anonymous teacher bloggers railed against the District’s hiring “newbie” teachers instead of experienced veterans, but had Goudreau working for the Huntley teachers in her first year of IEA full-time employment.

If you are a single teacher in Huntley, you now have to pay a minimum of $240 per year for medical and dental insurance.

That’s a victory for taxpayers when in the previous contract many single teachers didn’t have to pay a dime.

If you are Goudreau and the IEA, you probably don’t want the newspapers picking up on how the Huntley Board got this cost sharing into the contract.