Opinion ID: 2288016
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 15

Heading: Specialist Teachers for Specific Types of Subject-matter Taught or Services Offered

Text: Analysis discloses that the question of the employment of specialist teachers for particular subjects being taught or services being offered students is a matter bilaterally negotiable in collective bargaining and included within the sphere of binding arbitration. The issue, here, is posited not as requiring decision whether a particular subject, such as art, music or remedial reading is to be taught as part of the curriculum or whether a special type of service (such as guidance counseling, remedial reading or library) is to be offered. The assumption is that it has been settled that art, music, remedial reading, guidance counseling and library services are to be taught as subjects or offered as services. The question is, rather, who, shall do such teaching or provide such services  specifically, whether it shall be an additional ancillary task to be borne by regular class-room teachers who have other primary teaching and class-room responsibilities or whether it shall be made the primary responsibility of teachers who are fundamentally free of generalized regular teaching obligations and who are to concentrate as specialists in a subject-matter which involves special skills or knowledge. Clearly, to the extent that art, music, remedial reading, guidance and counseling or acting as a librarian do involve special types of skills and knowledge, to have regular teachers assume the additional ancillary responsibility for such specialities not only increases the work load of the regular teachers, as such, but also tends, indirectly, to cause them additional difficulties; it tends to introduce a potential for frustrations and dissatisfactions should regular teachers be unable to develop the special skills, or competencies, for which they are thus given ancillary responsibility. To have these working conditions aspects determined by bilateral negotiation and ultimately (should it be necessary) by binding arbitration, as with the issues of teacher aides for household tasks, impinges upon managerial and policy areas  over and above an involvement with the organization, direction and distribution of personnel  basically only in terms of the additional monetary expenditures which might be required to arrange for such specialist teachers. Hence, as with teacher aides for house-keeping tasks, the contacts with the managerial and policy realm must be held insufficient to override the prima facie eligibility for negotiation and binding arbitration established by the important working conditions factors present. That money expenditures might be involved does not preclude bilateral negotiation or binding arbitration but rather is only one of a plurality of considerations which enter into the ultimate determination by the arbitrators of whether, and to what extent, specialist personnel for the above designated special subjects or services shall be used rather than to have these special subjects or services (art, music, guidance counseling, remedial reading and library) be taken on as additional ancillary responsibilities of regular teachers who have other primary teaching tasks to perform. The arbitrators acted within their jurisdiction in making binding determinations concerning these questions of specialists for special subjects or services.