After a three-and-a-half-hour negotiation meeting Tuesday afternoon, the negotiators from the Mandan School Board and the Mandan Education Association still couldn't come to an agreement on teacher salaries.

Since April, the school board has been proposing a one-line teacher salary. Board members changed their proposal after they went into executive session for two hours during the school board meeting Monday night. In an effort to come to an agreement with the MEA, the board dropped the one-line idea and made a new proposal using the current teacher salary schedule.

The MEA didn't accept the new proposal with open arms.

The new salary proposal from the board would have a base pay of $23,630 for the first year of the contract and $24,320 the second year. However, in an effort to make Mandan starting teacher salaries more competitive to starting salaries across the state, the board wants to pay new teachers with no experience $25,331 the first year and increase starting pay to $26,071 the second year.

After the school board meeting Monday night, the negotiation teams met and came to agreements on five of the seven items presented before the Fact Finding Commission in July. The only two remaining issues were teacher salaries and co-curricular pay, but MEA negotiators say the board's new salary proposal conflicts with an issue they already agreed upon.

The teams agreed that teachers would receive credit for their years of experience in teaching. The MEA negotiators didn't want to accept the new proposal and referred to it as a "back-door one-line teacher salary schedule." The board's requested starting salary for new teachers would equal what current teachers with four years of experience are being paid.

The current teacher salary has six lanes and 22 steps categorized by what type of degree a teacher has and their years of experience. The board wants to take away the word "years" on the salary schedule and replace it with the word "steps." The wording change would allow the board to pay starting teachers the same amount as teachers with four years of experience.

The MEA is afraid that without the word "years," they wouldn't be guaranteed increased pay as they gain more experience.

Lynn Wolf, president of the Mandan School Board and negotiator, said it is not the intention of the board to not compensate teachers for their experience. The board wanted to put available money into the salary schedule and matrix as requested by the MEA, without breaking the bank.

"Good intentions are one thing, guaranteeing is another," David Mellon, negotiator for the MEA, said during the meeting.

The MEA wants the board to accept the salary schedule proposed by the fact finding commission, which added more lanes and steps to the current teacher salary. The additional lanes and steps would compensate teachers faster for furthering their professional development. The board argues the district doesn't have enough funding to support the commission's proposal.

The board says it has $525,000 in new monies for teacher salaries, and benefit and compensation packages. Of that amount, more than $408,000 would go to teacher salaries increases. The commission's proposal would cost the district an additional $100,000.

The MEA offered a counterproposal that would eliminate the additional steps and lanes from the salary schedule as long as the board agreed to fund it at the commission's proposal.

Wolf said the board negotiators couldn't accept the counterproposal from the MEA without having a special meeting with the other school board members. He also asked the MEA negotiators to take the board's proposal before its members to see if they would accept it. The MEA needs a majority vote from the 230 members to accept the board's proposal.

After the negotiation meeting, no additional meetings were scheduled, but the teams said they do want to meet by Friday. If no agreement is made by Friday, the fact finding commission will print its recommendations and name which party it considers to be at fault in the local papers.