TOWN OF TONAWANDA — Contract negotiations between the Ken-Ton school district and its teachers union ground to a halt this week with both sides at odds over compensation and health care contributions.

The Kenmore Teachers Association has filed a declaration of impasse over contract negotiations with the district, prompting the involvement of the Public Employment Relations Board and a mediator in an effort to reach an agreement. The union’s previous contract expired in 2009.

Specifically, the KTA and the district are at odds over teacher health care contributions and salary step increases. The KTA has rejected the district’s proposal to require current Ken-Ton teachers to pay 8 percent and new teachers to contribute 15 percent toward health insurance coverage, school board President Melissa Brinson said in a statement on behalf of the board during Tuesday’s Board of Education meeting.

“The district believes that this was a reasonable request to help contain future health insurance costs, particularly in light of the strains placed on so many of the district’s taxpayers in paying for their own health insurance coverage,” Brinson said.

She said the district has put forth other financial proposals that it felt would provide fair compensation increases for Ken-Ton teachers, “but the union has demanded more.”

Brinson cited the economic challenges with which the district must contend. “We are facing a $5.1 million cut in state aid. The removal of the NRG power plant from the property tax rolls will result in the loss of over $4 million in tax revenues per year,” she said, adding that Foundation Aid has been frozen for next school year.

“In this economy,” Brinson said, “we must stand up for the taxpayers. A final contract settlement must respect the taxpayers’ interests no less than it respects the interest of the district and its teachers.”

For its part, the Kenmore Teachers Association offered or agreed with several cost-saving proposals, including a retirement incentive that would have saved the district $802,000, KTA President Don Benker said. “She left out the fact that the board indicated it would refuse to sign that agreement,” he said, adding that it caused many teachers the undue stress of having to ponder their future with the district, only to learn months later that it was all for naught.

In addition, the union “whole-heartedly endorsed” a self-funded health insurance agreement that a union-recommended consultant said would save an estimated $500,000, according to Benker. “She left out all of those things,” he said. “Were we upset? Absolutely. Was she fair in what she said? No.”

Benker said Brinson’s statement Tuesday night violated the teachers’ contract regarding negotiations, on the grounds that there was no prior notice that she was going to offer a statement on the stalemate.

The district says the union rejected a proposal to suspend, at the end of the proposed four-year contract term, the current step increases under the teacher salary schedule. “These step increases result in automatic salary increases for district teachers that average over 3 percent each year, even in the absence of a contract settlement,” Brinson said in her statement.

She added that while there isn’t a contract for the current school year, teachers have received an average pay increase in excess of 3.6 percent.

Benker said it takes a Ken-Ton teacher 21 years to reach the top of the pay scale, and that teachers are presented with that salary schedule when they are hired. “To say that teachers should give up their legal rights to advance on a salary schedule that takes 21 years to get to the top...and then all of a sudden they propose no — that’s not acceptable,” Benker said.

He says union members are disappointed by the fact that the school board rejected a tentative agreement that was reached earlier in the school year with Superintendent Mark Mondanaro.

In January, Benker said, the school board informed the union that it would not support the agreement, and that it was bringing in a lawyer. “I’ve been the president for 37 years and have negotiated many contracts. Once we’ve had a tentative agreement, we have never had either the union turn it down or the district turn it down,” Benker said.

In moving forward, district administrators will sit down with the PERB mediator and present their case, while the union will do the same, in the hopes of finding a common ground.

Brinson said that’s been the board’s focus all along. “The board’s focus right now is the situation in regards to the contract. We have not once walked away from the table,” she said Friday. “We’ll continue to do what’s necessary to reach an agreement.”