RATHDRUM - The Lakeland Education Association teachers union rejected a tentative agreement with the school district Thursday.

The decision will extend negotiations into the school year, which starts Tuesday.

"While the use of a federal mediator did encourage the district to make a small concession on insurance, overall the core concerns of our membership remain unaddressed," Shannon Hall of the LEA wrote in an email to The Press.

"Essentially, our teachers have not fully recovered from multi-year pay freezes and cuts enacted by the Legislature several years ago."

Hall said Lakeland teachers are two experience steps behind other local districts, including Post Falls and Coeur d'Alene. Hall said Lakeland is often compared to those districts because they compete in the same hiring pool.

"Meanwhile, our teachers have increased their workload by implementing Common Core (standards) and other district programs," Hall wrote. "The LEA negotiation team, with the backing of its members, is willing to continue to negotiate these outstanding issues with the district in order to reach an agreement."

Tom Taggart, the district's finance director, said the district is disappointed that a deal isn't struck yet.

"We made concessions during mediation in the expectation of reaching a settlement," Taggart said. "We have offered more than what the state will be funding for teacher salaries next year. Our reserves have gone down the last two years and are projected to go down another $200,000 this year. Any additional employee costs would reduce it further.

"We would welcome and support additional state funding for school employees, but until that happens we will continue to do all we can to reward the hardworking employees of the district and be fiscally responsible."

When the negotiations will resume is unclear, Taggart said, adding that the hope was to have the contract finalized before the start of the school year.

"There is not a next step after mediation in Idaho code," he said. "We are currently focused on opening school next week and will return to this issue sometime in the future." The district issued contracts based on its offer and is moving ahead with the insurance as it agreed to during mediation.

"Idaho law is clear that last year's agreement expired June 30," Taggart said "In spite of this, we will continue to follow the provisions of that agreement throughout the coming year."

State law requires contracts be issued by July 1. Even though an agreement had not been reached, the district included the 1 percent base salary increase in the contracts.

"We had budgeted for that and thought it would be fair to all our teachers to do that," Taggart said.

Teachers can receive salary bumps with experience and education steps, merit pay and base salary raises.

Last week, the LEA and the school district reached a tentative agreement that included the 1 percent base salary hike for all employees. It also included funding single steps for experience and education.

The tentative agreement made no changes in the insurance plan. The district finally agreed to pay for a 7.4 percent increase in the employees' base insurance plan. The increase equates to about $85,000.

The tentative deal came after six meetings, including the last two with a federal mediator present.

The LEA has about 250 full-time teachers who will be covered in the agreement.

Taggart said the district wants to eventually restore all the experience steps, but is not in a financial position to do so at this time.

The salary adjustments in the tentative agreement are in addition to "leadership premium" funds approved by the 2014 Legislature and awarded to teachers who go above and beyond their assigned duties. Leadership funding can't be spent on across-the-board raises and is not subject to the collective bargaining process.

Districts can award premiums of $850 to $5,838, although some districts' premiums will cap at $2,000. Lakeland received a total of $212,000 in leadership award funds. Such money was previously distributed based on test scores.

Taggart said the leadership funds would've paid for restoring one of the experience steps, but the district doesn't have control over where the state applies those resources.

Neither classified employees nor district administrators fall under the negotiated agreement. Administrators will receive a 1.5 percent salary hike and classified employees will receive 1.5 to 4 percent. Neither of those groups receive education or experience steps to increase their salaries.