Sto-Rox teachers entered this school year without a contract after negotiations broke down in June.
Teachers’ union President Maria Kotek said administrators have refused to compromise with their demands since January, and the union filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board alleging that the district has engaged in bad-faith bargaining.
“Every time we would meet with them, their offer would come in lower than the previous offer,” Kotek said.
Almost all of Sto-Rox’s district’s 933 students are economically disadvantaged, and test scores tend toward the bottom in the state. For years, the district has hemorrhaged students to charter schools.
Annie Briscoe, a regional coordinator at the Pennsylvania State Education Association, said at a high-needs district like Sto-Rox, teachers go beyond their duties of teaching and the district needs to show they value and respect them by upholding their demands.
“When a district actually comes down in their proposals, and says ‘no, no, we think you’re worth less now than we thought you were worth a month ago,’ then that’s something that’s absolutely unacceptable,” she said.
Since the beginning of this year, Kotek, the Sto-Rox Education Association (SREA) president, said the district has refused to meet their requests for higher pay since the union began negotiating for a new contract in January.
The district started contract negotiations in February offering a 2.86% salary increase in the salary scale plus a one-time boost of 2.17%, according to SREA Secretary Joe Krajcovic. In March, the district eliminated the one-time boost, while raising the increase in scale to 3.27% — only to whittle that down to 3% and then to 2.87% by the end of May.
At $74,821, Sto-Rox has one of the lowest average annual teaching salaries among all school districts in Allegheny County. That figure is more than $30,000 below the average teacher salary in the Fox Chapel Area School District, the highest average in the county. Teachers at the county’s largest school district, Pittsburgh Public Schools, earn over $20,000 more than teachers at Sto-Rox on average.
Financial recovery and losing students
The district’s refusal to meet the SREA’s requests of higher wages and benefits comes amid decade-long financial challenges.
Following multiple years of budget deficits and depleting financial reserves, the state gave Sto-Rox Financial Watch Status in 2020 and moved it to Moderate Financial Recovery in 2021 after challenges persisted.
The state Department of Education appointed a chief recovery officer to create a financial recovery plan, which the district passed in 2022. The plan raised property taxes and employee health insurance costs and made cuts to transportation and special education budgets. Outside of its financial challenges, Sto-Rox has also struggled to maintain stable leadership, cycling through two full-time and three interim superintendents since 2021.
“The expectations [of teachers] do not reflect the economic realities of the Sto-Rox School District,” said district solicitor Ira Weiss, noting declining enrollment, coupled with rising charter school costs and an already high tax rate.
This year alone, Sto-Rox has projected a loss of 300 students. By 2024-25, nearly 40% of students living in the district were going to charter schools. The district’s tuition payment to charters rose from $7 million in 2019-20 to $10.5 million in 2025-26.
At 32.3 mills, the Sto-Rox school property tax is among the highest in the county.
“The district can raise taxes, but the district believes that it is asking a lot of this community to pay more in taxes than it’s paying now,” Weiss said.
Much of the taxpayers’ money has gone toward making capital improvements in heating and air conditioning.
This year, however, the district was able to pass a budget without requesting any state funding grants to keep up with annual operating costs.
Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, said the financial outlook at Sto-Rox remains precarious while the district loses students.
“I can imagine them wanting to be cautious and not over-obligate on a labor contract and watch their enrollment decline further and slide backwards into financial trouble again,” she said.
Low student outcomes at Sto-Rox also raise questions about teacher performance, she said. As of 2025-26, only 18% of students in kindergarten through third grade scored proficient or advanced in English and 16% scored proficient or advanced in math, well below the state average.
“[This situation] is a tough one because I understand why teachers would like to be paid more, and at the same time, really, I mean, outcomes are terrible,” she said.
Sto-Rox by the numbers
- 933 students enrolled
- 98% economically disadvantaged students
- 661 students attending charter schools
- 32.2837 mill property tax
Briscoe said teachers are frequently involved in classroom management challenges, including varying reading or math levels, behavior issues and a shortage of support staff such as paraprofessionals.
“So these are needs that are going unaddressed, and I hate to tie anything to testing scores because I think that’s a very short-sighted way to look at if something is working or not,” she said.
Disagreements on healthcare and wages
Teachers, including Kotek and union Vice President Denise McMichael, were optimistic after the last contract went into effect in 2023. They believed teachers received fair wages and healthcare benefits. The contract also reduced the time required to earn the highest salary from 18 to 15 years.
However, Kotek said the district’s proposed healthcare costs in the new contract were much higher than before and reduced the total pay for some teachers. She said the district also calculated teacher salaries based on inflated staffing levels. After the union brought up the discrepancy, district leaders corrected the number and moved the extra money to the general fund budget, rather than offering more in pay.
Weiss said the issue was resolved early on during the bargaining process and disagreed with Kotek’s claim about healthcare costs, saying teachers at Sto-Rox pay less in healthcare compared to other districts. Some school districts faced an 8% increase in healthcare this year.
“These teachers pay a very small amount, and we don’t believe that it is reasonable for this community to subsidize that sort of contribution towards healthcare,” he said.
Krajcovic said if employees pay substantially more for healthcare and salary increases remain minimal to non-existent, it sets up a situation where they do not receive cost of living adjustments in an economy rising with inflation.
Weiss said that despite the severe enrollment decline at Sto-Rox, district leaders chose not to furlough any teachers and filled any vacancies as they came up.
Kotek argued that the district was in a worse financial position during the previous contract negotiations but still managed to deliver a “fair contract.” She pointed out that the district’s choice not to furlough any teachers meant several teachers faced salary freezes. These issues have also led to a high teacher turnover rate in Sto-Rox.
“Freezes affect teachers’ salary not just in the year that they’re frozen, but it can affect their career earnings, and whenever you’re a teacher and you’re faced with a salary freeze for multiple years, that sets you back significantly for your career earnings, for your pension credit earnings,” Briscoe said.
Briscoe, who has helped with the union’s negotiations, said state funding for Sto-Rox has increased in several categories and the teachers’ demands were “well within the district’s budget.”
Since negotiations have been paused, the union began this school year without a contract.
“We understand that we’re in a poor district,” Kotek said. “We get it, but we would like to earn fair wages.”
The Sto-Rox administration hopes to reenter negotiations and rebuild trust.
“At that time, the SREA stated that the result of the bargaining process was built on trust and mutual respect. Frankly, we don’t believe that has continued,” Weiss said. “It’s unfortunate, but the district is prepared to go back to the table and explain again its proposal.”
Lajja Mistry is the K-12 education reporter at Pittsburgh’s Public Source. She can be reached at lajja@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Octavia Liku.
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