The Help Guide can be viewed or downloaded.
Help Guide
Searching by District and Document Characteristics
Searching by Word Relationships
The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has compiled this database of public school teacher collective bargaining agreements under the authority of Mass. General Laws c. 15, § 55A, as amended in 2008:
Each school district, including regional school districts and charter schools, shall annually file with the office [of school and district accountability within the department], on or before October 1, a copy of its current personnel contracts and collective bargaining agreements in a form and manner prescribed by the commissioner.
We welcome the public to use this database as a resource. Among other things, you can use the database to find particular district agreements or to search among the agreements for keywords.
The documents herein are provided for informational purposes only. They are derived from documents that school districts have submitted to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and may differ from the current collective bargaining agreements in format and in substance. To obtain an up-to-date and complete copy of any particular agreement, please contact the school district or collective bargaining agent.
· When you click on a link to the database from the ESE website, it opens the following page:
· Click to enter the database, which opens up on the List tab.
You can use List to quickly retrieve the teacher bargaining agreement of a specific district by name. Browse through the list of districts and select one by clicking on it. The following screen will open.
· Use your scroll bar or Page Up and Page Down to move around in the document.
· Note that the screen view is one continuous file with no page numbers. (There are downloadable pdf files that are paginated, but cannot be used for general searching.)
· Click on the link “Show detailed information about district and contract” to open the table of characteristics that can be used for searching (see next Help section.)
· To return to the document click on the link “Hide detailed information about districts and contract.”
·
Click on the pdf icon to
open the agreement as a file that you can print or save to your computer.
· To return to the database from the pdf file, use your browser’s back button.
· Click on the accessibility icon to open the agreement as an htm file that can be used by speech recognition software. The document has a different appearance because of the accessible formatting, but has the same text.
· As in pdf files, use your browser’s back button to return to the database from the htm file.
· Use your scroll bar or Page Up or [Ctrl] Home to get back to the top of the document at any time. From there, click on List to get back to the list and choose another district.
You can search the database in two different ways—by keywords or by district and document characteristics. If you search on a keyword, your results will include all district agreements that contain the word or phrase. If you search by selecting characteristics of districts and documents your results will include only agreements that match your criteria. By putting these two kinds of searches together, you can look for a keyword in a limited number of district agreements. For example, you can search for the keyword “sick leave” in the agreements of districts with less than 2,000 students.
· The Search screen has keyword and characteristics search fields, two search buttons, and a ‘clear fields’ button.
Enter a word or phrase in the Keyword search field, and click on either search button. In the example, we will search for “sick leave.”
· When you click on the search button, your search results will include every district agreement in the Commonwealth that contains “sick leave.”
· Advanced Keyword Searches explains more powerful ways to use keyword searching.
· Search Results explains how to work in the screens that come up after you click on the Search button.
To search within a smaller group of agreements, you can use any of the characteristics fields in the search table.
· In general, use no more than 3 or 4 fields in one search. Narrowing your search too much by specifying many criteria is likely to return no results. Quick tips about using each search field are available in the search table.
The following table explains each field, and how to use it, in more detail. Note that you can use the search button at the top or bottom of the search table—either works for any search.
District and Document Characteristics Search Fields
|
Search Field |
Description |
|---|---|
|
District |
All districts are in the drop-down list. You can select one, or select a specific group of districts by scrolling down the list and clicking on each district while holding down your control key. |
|
Type of District |
The drop-down list allows you to select all districts of one of the following types: Elementary, Municipal K-12, Regional K-12, Regional Secondary, Voc-Tech/Agricultural. |
|
Union Affiliation |
The drop-down list allows you to select all districts whose teachers are affiliated with one of the following: AFT (American Federation of Teachers - Massachusetts,) MTA (Massachusetts Teachers Association,) No Union, Teamsters. |
|
Expiring Year |
All expiring years of contracts currently in the database are in the drop-down list. You can select several years by scrolling down the list and clicking on each year, while holding down your control key. |
|
Superintendency Union |
All superintendency unions are in the drop-down list. Selecting a union will return all its member districts. You can select more than one union by scrolling down the list and clicking on each union while holding down the control key. (Note: shared superintendencies that are not formally unions are not included in the list.) |
|
Regional HS Members |
The drop-down list allows you to select a regional secondary district. This will return all the elementary member districts as well as the secondary district. |
|
County |
The drop-down list allows you to select all the districts in any Massachusetts county. |
|
ESE Region |
The drop-down list allows you to select all the districts in any of the six ESE regions supported by District and School Assistance Centers – Berkshires, Central, Greater Boston, Northeast, Pioneer Valley, Southeast – or in the group called the Commissioner’s Districts. |
|
Urban |
The drop-down list allows you to select ‘Urban Supt Network’ which will return the 24 districts that are members. |
|
Kind of Community |
The drop-down list allows you to select all districts of one community type as defined by the ESE School Finance Unit: economically developed suburbs, residential suburbs, resort/retirement/artistic, rural economic centers, small rural communities, urbanized centers. |
|
Number of Schools |
You can select a range such as ‘<10’, or ‘>20’, or ’10 to 12’. If you enter one number, only districts with exactly that number of schools will be returned. |
|
2009 Enrollment |
You can select a range such as ‘<3,000’, or ‘>10,000’, or ‘4,000 to 6,000’. If you enter one number, only districts with exactly that number enrolled will be returned. 2009 enrollment is the Oct. 1, 2008 SIMS data collection. |
|
2009 Percent Low Income Students |
Using numbers between 1 and 100 (no percent sign) you can select a range such as ‘<20’, or ‘>75’, or ’50 to 75’. If you enter one number, only districts with exactly that percent of low-income students will be returned. FY09, or the Oct. 1, 2008 SIMS data collection. |
|
Grade Start |
The drop-down list includes any start grade used by at least one district. This field allows you to select elementary or secondary districts by specific grade configurations. |
|
Grade End |
The drop-down list includes any ending grade used by at least one district. This field allows you to select elementary or secondary districts by specific grade configurations. |
· To start a new search, you can change one or more selections you have already made, or click on the Clear Fields button at the bottom of the search table to start over.
Search Results explains how to work in the screens that come up after you click on the Search button.
When you click on the search button, the following screen will appear.
· The number of district agreements that match your search is shown above the list of districts. A few basic characteristics of districts are listed across (Type of District, 2009 Enrollment, and Number of Schools.)
· Click on a district name to open its agreement document. See List for an explanation of the icons and link in the upper left of the district page screen.
If you searched on a keyword, click on the link “Locate first search result in document” to review the hits in the agreement.
· Keyword hits are tagged and highlighted. To move through all the hits for your keyword in this agreement, keep clicking on the last hit on a screen.
· Use the scroll bar or Page Up or [Ctrl] Home to return to the top of the document. To return to your results list, click on the Results tab at the top of the page.
· To start a new search, click on the Search tab at the top of the screen. You can modify one of your previous search terms and search again, or use Clear Fields to start over.
This section explains some powerful additional features available for keyword searches. Searching based on proximity, wildcards, and word relationships can help you to, for instance, find examples of a concept that is not expressed in only one or two words. These search techniques can be combined in one keyword phrase for even more complex searches. Searching for numeric ranges, which applies to a few of the available search fields, is explained in the next section.
Whether using simple or advanced keyword searches, experiment freely and keep refining your keywords and phrases based on the results. You will get better and better at keyword searching if you experiment.
A proximity search looks for two words or phrases if they occur near each other. For example, if you wanted to look for clauses concerning whether teachers can use sick leave days as personal days, you could try the keyword search “sick leave near personal”:
· This search returns almost 250 results, and the hits in an agreement may look like this:
· To refine your search and get results that better match what you are looking for, you could try the keyword search “sick leave near personal day”:
· This search returns just over 20 results, so it has narrowed your search considerably. Some of the hits may look like this:
· This is closer to your question but your search can be refined better still, as we will demonstrate in the next section.
The default range for proximity searches is up to ten words apart, but you can specify a wider or narrower range, from 2 to 100, with a keyword search like “sick leave near(20) personal day”:
Wildcard searching can help you find something you can’t quite remember, or all the variations of a word than might return useful results for your search. To use a wildcard, enter a word or part of a word followed by an asterisk (*) as in the example “sick leave near personal day*”:
· This will return ‘personal days’ as well as ‘personal day’—about 70 districts show up in the search results, with hits that are closer to the question about whether sick leave days can be used as personal days.
Using a wildcard before and after a keyword widens a search further. For example, *bargain* would return not only bargaining but nonbargaining.
Two terms—“and” and “or”— can be used to specify a relationship between words or phrases to narrow or broaden your search in a useful way. The search terms are used as follows:
· A and B narrows your search by looking for A, but only returning a hit if B is also in the document.
· A or B widens your search range by looking for A and then for B, and returning results if either A or B is in the document.
An example of using these two terms to search for a concept that may be described with different words is the following ways of searching for ‘supermax’ and ‘longevity.’
· A keyword search for ‘supermax’ yields 8 results. A keyword search for ‘longevity’ yields 265 results.
· ‘Supermax and longevity’ yields only 2 results, indicating that these terms may be mutually exclusive, but not always.
· ‘Supermax or longevity’ yields 269 results, capturing the concept independent of the term used.
Note that because these two terms are used as programming terms, you should not use them in keyword phrases unless you put quotes around the word. For instance, you should look for ‘wages and benefits’ this way: wages “and” benefits.
You can further refine a search by combining proximity, wildcard, and/or word relationship searches. In one example above, proximity and wildcard searching were combined.
· Another example might be *duty* and lunch to find provisions about duty-free or off-duty time during lunch periods.
Experimenting freely will help you to get better and better at keyword searching.
Numeric range searches are used in only three search fields – Number of Schools, 2009 Enrollment, and 2009 Percent Low Income Students. You can use the word “to” to specify a range (10 to 14) or use the ‘less than’ and ‘greater than’ signs (< , >) as shown in the following examples. Note that you do not use the % sign in the field 2009 Percent Low Income Students.
· Search for all districts with 10-14 schools like this—“10 to 14”:
· This search returns districts with 10, 11, 12, 13, or 14 schools.
· Search for districts with 10 or more schools with “>9”:
· Search for districts with less than 10 schools with “<10”:
· The term “not” excludes one specific number from a search. The search “not 10” returns all districts that have less than or more than 10 schools.
· For searches using the field 2009 Percent Low Income Students do not use the percent sign. Search for a range of percent of low income students like this—“20 to 40”.
