PHILADELPHIA FEDERATION OF TEACHERS, AFT, LOCAL 3, AFL-CIO and Jerry Jordan, Appellees v. SCHOOL DISTRICT OF PHILADELPHIA, the School Reform Commission, William J. Green, Feather Houstoun, Fara Jimenez, Marjorie Neff, and Sylvia Simms, in their Official Capacities as Members of the School Reform Commission, and Dr. William R. Hite, Jr., in his Official Capacity as the Superintendent of Schools, School District of Philadelphia, Appellants.
Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.
Argued May 11, 2016. Decided Aug. 15, 2016.
144 A.3d 1281
In the case at bar, the PCRA fully addressed the issues raised in Sepulveda‘s first, timely PCRA petition (which included several amendments) and rendered a final decision on that petition in 2007. Sepulveda appealed from the final order disposing of his first PCRA petition to this Court. After thoroughly considering all of the issues presented on appeal, this Court issued an order remanding the case to the PCRA court for its consideration of two specific and discrete issues. By permitting Sepulveda to amend his otherwise finally decided PCRA petition with new, previously unraised claims, the PCRA court exceeded the scope of our remand order and the scope of its authority. We therefore vacate the portion of the August 14, 2015 PCRA court order granting Sepulveda permission to amend his PCRA petition and deciding the merits of the claims raised.
Order vacated in part. Jurisdiction relinquished.
Chief Justice SAYLOR and Justices BAER, TODD, DOUGHERTY, WECHT and MUNDY join the opinion.
John R. Bielski, Lauren Miller Hoye, Amy Louise Rosenberger, Ralph J. Teti, Deborah R. Willig, Willig, Williams & Davidson, Philadelphia, for Appellees.
Lisa Ann Barton, Richard L. Bazelon, A. Richard Feldman, Bazelon Less & Feldman, P.C., David Pittinsky, Ballard Spahr LLP, Philadelphia, for Appellants.
SAYLOR, C.J., BAER, TODD, DONOHUE, DOUGHERTY, WECHT, JJ.
Chief Justice SAYLOR.
This appeal concerns whether power is invested in a school reform commission, under a statutory regime designed to facilitate rehabilitation of financially distressed school districts, to unilaterally alter terms and conditions of employment for teachers whose interests are represented by a bargaining unit.
In 1959, the General Assembly enacted the Distressed School Law,1 amending the Public School Code of 1949,2 and providing for special boards of control to govern school districts deemed to be financially distressed. See
cancel or to renegotiate any contract other than teachers’ contracts to which the board or the school district is a party, if such cancellation or renegotiation of contract will effect needed economies in the operation of the district‘s schools.
In 1998, the Legislature implemented additional measures specific to distressed school districts of the first class—i.e., the School District of Philadelphia (the “District“)—by adding Section 696 to the School Code.3 Among other provisions that had the effect of affording the Commonwealth an expanded role in the governance of financially-distressed school districts of the first class, the legislation, as amended as of October 2001,4 provided for the establishment of a five-member school reform commission, within 30 days after the issuance of a
declaration of distress by the Secretary of Education, to assume the responsibility for the operation, management and educational program of the district. See
Of particular relevance here, Section 696(i) conferred upon a school reform commission the powers afforded to special boards of control under Section 693(a)(1). See
Within its subsection (k), Section 696 also imposed a number of requirements and restrictions upon collective bargaining between the distressed district and employee bargaining units, see
In December 2001, the Secretary of Education issued a declaration of financial distress pertaining to the District, and a school reform commission (the “SRC” or the “Commission“)
was constituted and assumed responsibility for the District‘s operations, management, and educational program, per Section 696 of the School Code. Throughout the ensuing years, the SRC and appellee, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, AFT, Local 3, AFL-CIO (the “Union“),7 negotiated several collective bargaining agreements, the most recent of which was effective from September 2009 through August 2012, and extended through August 2013. For some period thereafter, the parties adhered to the terms of the expired agreement, consistent with the general, labor-law protocol. See In re Appeal of Cumberland Valley Sch. Dist., 483 Pa. 134, 143, 394 A.2d 946, 951 (1978).
In 2014, the SRC sought leave to file an original jurisdiction complaint in this Court, seeking a declaration that it had the power to unilaterally modify work practices and rules that, under Section 696(k)(2), lay outside the scope of mandatory bargaining. The Court denied such request in June 2014. See SRC v. Phila. Fed‘n of Teachers, 626 Pa. 115, 95 A.3d 269 (2014) (per curiam).8
Several months later, the SRC adopted “Resolution SRC-1,” entitled, “Implementation of Modified Economic Terms with [the Union]; Cancellation of Collective Bargaining Agreement.” The instrument explained that the District‘s longstanding and extreme financial crisis continued, despite “significant and historic cost-reduction measures,” including dozens of school closures, thousands of employee layoffs, a prolonged freeze on charter-school expansion, and substantial wage and benefit concessions from employee organizations. Resolution SRC-1, at 1 (Oct. 6, 2014). According to the document, the District‘s operating budget remained insufficient to provide adequate funding for essential services.
The resolution further described an ongoing multi-year negotiations process, referred to as a “marathon of collective bargaining,” between the District and the Union with the assistance of mediators from the Pennsylvania State Bureau of Mediation, which had yet to culminate in an agreement. Id. In the Commission‘s judgment, it related, curtailment of benefits for the employees, and modification of some other terms and conditions of employment, was necessary to effect needed economies in school operations. See id.
For these reasons, the SRC invoked Sections 693(a)(1) of the School Code, as incorporated into Section 696(i), to “make
Contemporaneous with the issuance of Resolution SRC-1, the Commission, the District, and the Department of Education lodged a declaratory judgment action in the Commonwealth Court. The plaintiffs asked that court to uphold the
imposition of the new economic terms and conditions as being authorized by applicable law.
The Union responded with a grievance protesting the SRC‘s actions and seeking arbitration, an unfair labor practice charge filed before the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board, and a complaint in equity for temporary restraining order and preliminary injunctive relief. The complaint sought solely to preserve the status quo until the parties concluded the anticipated labor arbitration of their dispute and attained resolution of the unfair labor practice charge. Throughout its various submissions to the common pleas court, the Union took the position that the restriction, within Section 693(a)(1), upon the cancellation or renegotiation of “teachers’ contracts” plainly encompassed contracts that govern teachers’ employment, such as a collective bargaining agreement establishing the terms and conditions for such engagement. The Union also maintained that the bargaining efforts between it and the District had not reached an impasse.
The SRC urged the common pleas court to stay the proceedings before it, so that material legal issues could be adjudicated in the Commonwealth Court. Further, the Commission took the position that the injunction requested by the Union, if granted, would cause irreparable harm by requiring the District to “stop restoring crucial funds to the schools to pay for books, school supplies as basic as paper and art supplies, and most importantly, much needed staff, such as counselors, reading specialists, and other specialists and programs to be devoted to the District‘s most at-risk students.” Defendants’ Memorandum of Law in Opposition to Plaintiffs’ Petition for a Temporary Restraining Order and Preliminary Injunctive Relief (“Defendants’ Memorandum“) in Phila. Federation of Teachers, AFT, Local 3, AFL-CIO v. Sch. Dist. of Phila., No. 01842 Oct. Term 2014 (C.P.Phila), at 3.
On the merits, the SRC maintained that, since a collective bargaining agreement is a contract, there could be no question that
ed, was also undeniable, given a projected funding shortfall for the next fiscal year of $71 million, heralded in part by the two major cost drivers of employee health care costs and state-mandated contributions to employee pensions.
The SRC depicted Section 696 as “redr[awing] the map for collective bargaining between the School District and its unions, curtailing union rights and conferring exceptional powers on the SRC and the School District to cope with the challenges posed by fiscally distressed circumstances.” Defendants’ Memorandum in Phila. Federation of Teachers, AFT, Local 3, AFL-CIO v. Sch. Dist. of Phila., No. 01842 Oct. Term 2014 (C.P.Phila), at 5. To the degree that the Union would question the Commission‘s imposition of new terms and conditions, as contrasted with cancellation as such, the SRC asserted that the power to cancel a collective bargaining agreement “carries with it the power to implement new cost-saving terms and conditions.” Id. at 15.
The SRC also responded to the position that Section 693(a)(1)‘s exception for “teachers’ contracts” might encompass collective bargaining agreements involving teachers. In this regard, the Commission took that position that the term has long had a specific and definite meaning in Pennsylvania law, referring only to individual contracts that each school district has with its teachers, as required by the Teachers’ Tenure Act of 1937.10 See id. at 30.
After a hearing, the common pleas court granted the preliminary injunction, which it later converted to a permanent one upon the parties’ stipulation. With regard to the phrase
“teachers’ contracts” as employed in Section 693(a)(1), the court found that collective bargaining agreements had been referred to as such by courts in a long line of cases.11 Accordingly, the court
On the SRC‘s appeal, the Commonwealth Court affirmed. See Phila. Fed‘n of Teachers, AFT, Local 3, AFL-CIO v. Sch. Dist. of Phila., 109 A.3d 298 (Pa.Cmwlth.2015) (en banc). Initially, the court disagreed with the common pleas court‘s determination that the Commission‘s Section 693 powers had to be exercised within 60 days after it assumed control of the District. See id. at 303 n. 5 (noting the impracticability of requiring school reform commissions to exercise all powers under Section 693 within 60 days after their creation and indicating that “it appears that this limitation applied to the time period within which a school district‘s board of directors must comply with the directives of a special board of control to
revise a budget“).12 Nevertheless, in broad terms, the intermediate court credited the common pleas court‘s holding that Sections 693(a)(1) and 696(i) did not permit the Commission to cancel the collective bargaining agreement or impose new terms and conditions of employment upon teachers whose rights and interests were subjects of that agreement.
The Commonwealth Court proceeded to offer a general discussion of the collective bargaining process in the public employment setting, under PERA, encompassing the employees’ right to strike in the event of an impasse. See id. at 303-04 (citing Curley v. Bd. of Sch. Dirs. of Greater Johnstown Sch. Dist., 163 Pa.Cmwlth. 648, 659, 641 A.2d 719, 724-25 (1994)). The intermediate court observed that PERA establishes mandatory subjects of bargaining, encompassing wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment, see
The Commonwealth Court then reviewed the various relevant amendments to the School Code, and in particular, the addition of Section 696 via Act 46. See Phila. Fed‘n of Teachers, 109 A.3d at 306-08. In this respect, the intermedi-
ate court emphasized that Section 696(k) “clearly conveys that distressed first-class school
The analysis then segued into a discussion of employers’ options upon a bargaining impasse, including, according to the Commonwealth Court at least, the unilateral imposition of new terms and conditions of engagement for employees. See id. at 309-11.13 In any event, however, the intermediate court explained that the parties were in agreement that an impasse had not been declared or reached in the present circumstances. See id. at 311 n. 19.
With regard to the impact of the Distressed School Law, and Section 693(a)(1) in particular, the Commonwealth Court declined to focus on the central question presented to it concerning whether the term “teachers’ contracts,” as used in
Section 693(a)(1), subsumes collective bargaining agreements. See, e.g., id. at 314 (discussing the parties’ arguments on the point and indicating that, “[i]n any event, section 693(a)(1) is not controlling as it does not specifically address [collective bargaining agreements], override the relevant provisions of PERA, or empower the SRC to unilaterally impose new economic terms and conditions of employment.“). Rather, adopting a broader frame of reference, the intermediate court appeared to take the position that collective bargaining agreements simply are not “contracts” at all for purposes of Section 693(a)(1), given that the Legislature had “reference[d] [collective bargaining agreements and contracts] individually in ... sections 693 and 696.” Id. at 312.14
cancellation powers relative to “teachers’ contracts,” in Section 693(a)(1), as creating a distinction between a school reform commission‘s ability to cancel collective bargaining agreements as to teachers, versus cancellation relative to other employees.15
The Commonwealth Court further emphasized the absence, in Section 693, of any specific reference to collective bargaining, any terms overriding relevant provisions of PERA, or any language empowering a special board of control unilaterally to impose new economic terms and conditions of employment. See, e.g., id. at 314. The court also suggested that the approach of replacing a selected number of the provisions of a collective bargaining agreement, while retaining the remainder, simply was not tantamount to cancellation in any event. See id. at 316.
Next, the Commonwealth Court considered an argument by the SRC that, via 2012 amendments to the School Code,16 the General Assembly solidified the position that the term “teachers’ contracts” excludes collective bargaining agreements. These amendments, pertaining to certain school districts other than those of the first class, see
express proviso that “[c]ollective bargaining agreements are specifically exempt.”
We allowed the SRC‘s appeal to consider whether the Legislature conferred upon the entity the power to cancel collective bargaining agreements. Our review of the matter of statutory construction is plenary. Oliver v. City of Pittsburgh, 608 Pa. 386, 393, 11 A.3d 960, 964 (2011).
Preliminarily, we observe that the litigants offer many lines of argumentation in their briefs. The dispositive issue, we find, lies in the construction of the term “teachers’ contracts” in Section 693(a)(1) of the School Code, upon which our treatment, below, focuses.
Presently, the SRC maintains that collective bargaining agreements are “contracts” subject to the general cancellation power under Section 693(a)(1), and that the exception for “teachers’ contracts” does not apply.
was employed, in judicial decisions and otherwise, to refer to the individual contracts for professional employees required under Section 1121 of the School Code,
For this reason, the SRC portrays the pivotal phrase as a term of art, the meaning of which should be confined closely according to such limited and fixed understanding. See
public school teachers in Pennsylvania lacked collective bargaining rights when the Distressed School Law was promulgated.
Citing Smith v. School District of Township of Darby, 388 Pa. 301, 130 A.2d 661 (1957), the SRC also asserts that the “teachers’ contract” exception to its cancellation prerogative should be construed narrowly in its favor. See id. at 314, 130 A.2d at 668-69 (“School authorities must be given broad discretionary powers to ensure a better education for the children of this Commonwealth and any restrictions on the exercise of these powers must be strictly construed on the basis that the public interest predominates and private interests are subordinate thereto.“). Furthermore, the Commission references the presumption, in statutory construction, that, “when a court of last resort has construed the language used in a statute, the General Assembly in subsequent statutes on the same subject matter intends the same construction to be placed upon such language.”
Additionally, the SRC contends that the Legislature, via various amendments to the School Code, has reaffirmed its power to cancel a collective bargaining agreement several times. In this regard, the Commission references: Act 46‘s repeal of PERA insofar as it was inconsistent with Section 693(a)(1) and 696(i), see Act 46, § 28; the 2001 exemption of the SRC‘s Section 693 powers from 696(k)(5)‘s ban on negating collective bargaining agreements, see
In the broadest frame, the SRC maintains that its actions have been eminently reasonable in view of the District‘s financial plight. See, e.g., Brief for Appellants at 51 (“The ability to hire enough staff, to keep the schools clean and safe, to buy books and other school supplies and offer sports, art, music and other essential programs ... must take precedence over the private interests of unions and their members in retaining a health benefits package so generous that it has become all but extinct in the marketplace.“). Furthermore,
the Commission portrays the curtailment of benefits that it has attempted to implement as modest. Finally, the Commission reiterates that the right to a public education is rooted in this Commonwealth‘s Constitution, see Sch. Dist. of Wilkinsburg v. Wilkinsburg Educ. Ass‘n, 542 Pa. 335, 343, 667 A.2d 5, 9 (1995) (observing that “public education in Pennsylvania is a fundamental right” (citing
The Union and its amici, for their part, acknowledge that the interests of students are of paramount concern, but they differ with the SRC‘s perspective that the impairment
As to the relevant matter of statutory construction, from the point of view of the Union and Amici, the “teachers’ contracts” exception in Section 693(a)(1) plainly subsumes collec-
tive bargaining agreements, which are contracts governing teachers’ employment with a school district. See Brief for Appellees at 35; accord Brief for Amici at 10 (referring to a teachers’ contract as “a contract of some kind that covers the employment of teachers“). Indeed, they view it as common parlance—amidst the general public as well as in judicial opinions—to refer to a teachers’ collective bargaining agreement as a teachers’ contract. See supra note 11. Furthermore, the Union and Amici highlight Section 696(k)(4)‘s apparent reference to a collective bargaining agreement as a “contract.” See supra note 14.
Responding to the SRC‘s position that the term “teachers’ contract” refers only to individual teacher tenure contracts, the Union explains that the relevant statutes themselves do not contain such specific term. Moreover, the Union and Amici regard it as tangential at best that various courts may have used what they regard as an umbrella phrase to refer to discrete examples of individual teacher‘s contracts. See, e.g., Brief for Appellees at 32 (“The mere fact that these courts used this phrase when interpreting the Teachers’ Tenure Act and discussing individual teacher tenure contracts has no relevance to Section 6-693(a)(1)—an entirely different provision in the Public School Code, enacted decades after the Teachers’ Tenure Act.“).
On this point, Amici offer the following elaboration:
Amici tend to agree with the SRC‘s point (as far as it goes) that it is unlikely that the General Assembly, when it enacted that portion of the School Code giving distressed Districts the ability to reject “teachers’ contracts” in 1959, thought that term (which is more descriptive than it is a term of art) applied to collective bargaining agreements. But that is not because of any significant difference between teachers’ employment contracts and collective bargaining agreements involving teachers units. Lack of conscious association of teachers with [collective bargaining agreements] would have stemmed simply from the scarcity, at that time, of [collective bargaining agreements] covering teachers’ units. It would take another 11 years before
public school teachers were granted in PERA an effective right to organize and engage in collective bargaining. But, since that time, with
Brief for Amici at 7-9 (footnotes omitted); accord id. at 10 (“The evil addressed by [Section 693(a)(1)] was the need to protect teachers’ contractual employment conditions from the broad power distressed school districts were afforded to cancel burdensome contracts.“).
According to the Union and its amici, the SRC‘s position is further undermined by a line of judicial decisions determining that, through PERA‘s conferral of collective bargaining rights, individual employment contracts have been subsumed within and negated by existing collective bargaining agreements to the extent there may be inconsistencies. See Leechburg Area Sch. Dist. v. Leechburg Educ. Ass‘n, 475 Pa. 413, 420, 380 A.2d 1203, 1206 (1977) (plurality); Tunkhannock Area Sch. Dist. v. Tunkhannock Area Educ. Ass‘n, 992 A.2d 956, 960 (Pa.Cmwlth.2010). They also maintain that Act 46 specifically restated the collective bargaining obligations of the District and the Union, see, e.g.,
the SRC claims to possess—to cancel the contract it had already negotiated.“). Furthermore, the Union and its amici stress, there is nothing on the face of Act 46 that is inconsistent with PERA‘s grant of authority to public school employees to “organize, form, join or assist in employe organizations or to engage in lawful concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid and protection or to bargain collectively through representatives of their own free choice....”
The Union and Amici believe that the legislative history of relevant amendments to the Public School Code support their position. See, e.g., Brief for Appellees at 59-60 (“The clear import of [an] exchange [on the floor of the House of Representatives] is that Pennsylvania legislators were concerned that the [2001] amendment preserved only teachers’ collective bargaining agreements in the District, but not collective bargaining agreements of non-professional employees such as janitors, bus drivers and food-service workers.“); see also supra note 15.
In terms of the 2012 amendments to the School Code, the Union and Amici urge that there was no cause or incentive for the Legislature to alter Section 693(a)(1), since there was no evidence that the statute had been misunderstood as pertaining to collective bargaining agreements in the first instance. See Brief for Appellees at 38 (“[B]etween 1959, when Section 6-693(a)(1) was added to the Public School
Having considered the respective positions presented, we agree with the Union and its amici that the exception to the SRC‘s statutory contract-cancellation power pertaining to “teachers’ contracts” subsumes collective bargaining agreements at least insofar as they pertain to teachers. See
engagement. See generally Skeim v. Indep. Sch. Dist. No. 115, 305 Minn. 464, 464, 234 N.W.2d 806, 810 (1975) (referring to a collective bargaining agreement as a “master teachers’ contract“); 20 WILLISTON ON CONTRACTS § 55:19 (4th ed.2010) (depicting collective bargaining agreements as a form of master contract). This broader connotation of the phrase “teachers’ contract” is reflected both in common parlance,19 as well as in numerous judicial decisions, see, e.g., supra note 11.20
Certainly, as the parties and Amici have discussed at length, members of the General Assembly may not have focused upon collective bargaining agreements at the time the Distressed School Law was enacted, given that there was no right at that time to collective bargaining in the public sector. Nevertheless, the clear intent was to protect the core relationship establishing terms and conditions for teachers’ employment, as was then memorialized via teacher tenure contracts. Accordingly, upon the advent of public-sector collective bargaining, it is entirely fitting that the term “teachers’ contract” has been otherwise applied to collective bargaining agreements—which now embody the essential professional relationship. In the circumstances, we do not view our task, in interpreting broad statutory language, as “the hopeless one of ascertaining what the legislators who passed the law would have decided had they reconvened to consider [this] particular
case[].” Beecham v. United States, 511 U.S. 368, 374, 114 S.Ct. 1669, 1672, 128 L.Ed.2d 383 (1994). Rather, we take the more practicable approach of adhering to the ordinary meaning of the enacted text. See id.
In terms of the policy considerations involved, we agree with the Commission that the remedial nature of Sections 693 and 696 of the School Code is very important, but we also find there to be a countervailing policy, in that PERA was enacted to mitigate the impingements on government operations caused by labor strife. See generally PLRB v. State College Area Sch. Dist., 461 Pa. 494, 502, 337 A.2d 262, 266 (1975) (explaining that the pre-PERA circumstances—in which public employees were prohibited from striking and lacked the right to bargain collectively—fostered a “chaotic climate that resulted from this obviously intolerable situation” and heralded the creation of a government commission which found a “need for collective bargaining to restore harmony in the public sector and to eliminate the numerous illegal strikes and the widespread labor unrest“). Indeed, the Union and Amici aptly explain that investiture in the SRC of a unilateral right of cancellation, particularly while depriving employees of the right to strike, see
Nothing else in the SRC‘s presentation persuades us that we should depart from the interpretation of “teachers’ contracts” as subsuming collective bargaining agreements involving teachers. See generally Karoly v. Mancuso, 619 Pa. 486, 510-11, 65 A.3d 301, 316 (2013) (“As a general rule, the best indication of the General Assembly‘s intent in enacting a statute may be found in its plain language.” (citation omitted)). Along these lines, we agree with the Union and Amici that the
repeal of PERA in the present context was a limited one that did not extend to the present circumstances on account of the teachers‘-contracts exception to cancellation powers, see Act 46, § 28; the 2001 exemption of the SRC‘s Section 693 powers from Section 696(k)(5)‘s ban on negating collective bargaining agreements appears to pertain to other aspects of Section 693;22 and the withholding of cancellation power for collective bargaining agreements from non-first-class school districts in the 2012 amendments is not mutually exclusive with the understanding that such power already had been withheld from special boards of control relative to teachers per Section 693(a)(1) of the School Code and, derivatively, school reform commissions under Section 696(i).
We hold, at least insofar as teachers are concerned, that collective bargaining agreements are “teachers’ contracts” which are excepted from a school reform commission‘s cancellation powers.
The order of the Commonwealth Court is affirmed, albeit on different grounds.
Justices BAER, TODD, DONOHUE, DOUGHERTY and WECHT join the opinion.