Date/Time: Friday, March 20, 2026, 9:00am-12:00pm
Location: ZOOM

Present

APA Statewide

• Rosa Di Virgilio Taormina, President
• Rebecca (Becca) Ramirez-McKinley, Vice President
• Mark R. Powers, Secretary
• Sharon Francis, Treasurer (Non-voting)
• Aaron Childs, Membership Coordinator (Non-voting)
• Julie Dunlap LePoer, Web Manager (Non-voting)
• Sean Barrett, MTA Field Representative (Non-voting)

APA Chapter Presidents

• Seth Bean, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
• Brian Cahillane, Westfield State University
• Kelly DeMello, Massachusetts Maritime Academy
• Eric Feibel, Bridgewater State University
• Susan McNeil, Massachusetts College of Art & Design
• Rebecca Shersnow, Fitchburg State University
• Absent: APA Statewide:
• Sherry Horeanopoulos, Health & Welfare Trust (Non-voting)
• APA Chapter Presidents:
• Peter Fenuccio, Worcester State University
• Michael Merriam, Framingham State University
• Rosa Taormina, Salem State University

Guests

• Maggie Shirland, VP Massachusetts College of Art & Design

Absent

APA Statewide

• Sherry Horeanopoulos, Health & Welfare Trust (Non-voting)

APA Chapter Presidents

• Peter Fenuccio, Worcester State University
• Michael Merriam, Framingham State University

Call to Order

• March 20, 2026 Time: 9:02 am

Minutes

1. Approval of February 20, 2026 Executive Board Meeting Minutes
   • Amendments: None
   • Motion 2026.03.20-00
   • Motion to approved the minutes of the February 20, 2026 Executive Board Meeting as presented/amended made:
   • by: S. McNeil 2nd by: R. Taormina
   • Vote: Unanimous Action: Motion Carries

Public Comments

1. None.

President’s Report –
Rosa Di Virgilio Taormina

1. Update on Signed CBA – no updates yet.
2. Amended Bylaws – Statewide Membership Vote. March 30th will be the day voting opens and remain open for 72 hours.
3. Volunteer needed to serve as a research liaison with The Center for Education Policy & Practice (CHEPP) for a cost-of-living study at the various campuses. Involves all three unions.
4. Employee Relations Committee
5. Westfield – A member who had an issue with the APA Listening Tour went to HR/Management and claimed APA was promoting violence.
6. GIC
7. Sean Barrett – MTA Report
   1. The Bright Act seems to be moving forward.
   2. Ways and Means Committee
      • Join educators and public education supporters from across the commonwealth as we advocate for the FY27 funding that our schools, colleges, and universities deserve. Spoken and written testimony is especially important at this public hearing!
      • Location: Massachusetts State House, 24 Beacon St, Gardner Auditorium, Boston, MA 02108 WrittenTestimonySubmissionFormSpokenTestimonySignUpWesternMassBustoBostonSignUp

Treasurer’s Report – Sharon Francis

1. Payroll due on Saturday, February 21, 2026 by 12:00pm
2. Approval of February 2026 Treasurer’s Report
   • Amendments: None
   • Motion 2026.03.20-01
   • Motion to approve Treasurer’s report as presented/amended made:
   • by: R. Shersnow 2nd by: S. Bean
   • Vote: Unanimous Action: Motion Carries

Higher Education (HELC) Updates – Rebecca (Becca) Ramirez-McKinley

1. HELC Bargaining Council – Meets 8:30am to 10:00am every 4th Friday of the month (from Sep 26, 2025 to Jun 26, 2026 to discuss collective bargaining issues.
2. CHEQA Updates –
3. Legislative Bargaining updates –
   • Bill H.2767 An Act establishing a commission to resolve issues arising from collective bargaining stalemates
4. Surveys to the Membership – good response from Membership on this first survey, which closes today. Will review and summarize the response data in time for the April E-Board meeting.

Membership and Data – Aaron Childs

1. 1566 Overall Membership since February 2026. A(n) Increase/Decrease of 0.
2. 317 Non-Dues Paying Member. An Increase of 15 since February 2026.
3. I reached out to the State Comptroller’s office asking if I could get the termination dates of members who were identified in my December audit. Also Wicked busy month of updates as the locals are getting through the January audit.

Website – Julie Dunlap LePoer

1. Regular updates made to website.
2. Annual Subscription for Pantheon renews April 1st

Health and Welfare Fund Report – Sherry Horeanopoulos

1. No report at this time.

Committee Reports

1. Budget Committee – Bean, Cahillane, Francis, Ramirez-McKinley
2. Committee on Professional Development – Vacant
3. Special Committees:
   • Committee on Legislative Action – Vacant
   • Committee on Health & Safety – Vacant
   • APA/Management Working Group – Vacant
4. Employee Relations Committee (ERC) as per the APA CBA – Powers/Ramirez-McKinley/Taormina

Old/New Business

1. Endorse Amherst Compact (Taormina)
   • The Amherst Compact to Coordinate Higher Education Bargaining in the Northeast 2026 We–as unionized workers in higher ed institutions–aim to resolve the crisis our sector faces by proposing a transformative vision of higher education from the perspective of labor. Decades of disinvestment have done profound damage. We see the wreckage in the precarious jobs our members work and the untenable debt loads we, our students, and our institutions have taken on. The most recent political assaults on higher ed threaten to remake the sector entirely, deforming and distorting the promise of higher education as a social good, limiting opportunity and capacity for students, workers, and communities, and diverting resources away from those communities to top-heavy management. All higher ed workers and students are now vulnerable, but particularly those who are low-income, working-class, or who come from racialized minority populations, are queer, trans, and/or non-citizens. All workers, even the most secure, face the corrosive consequences of sweeping contingency. Educational, research, and service missions increasingly hang by a thread, and the authority and autonomy of higher ed workers to meaningfully direct and oversee the integrity of their institutions has been weakened.
     
     As unions representing the workers who make higher education happen, our members are uniquely positioned to change the status quo. We are food service, custodial, grounds and maintenance, clerical, security, research, technical, teaching, professional staff, medical, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral workers. We work in community and technical colleges, public colleges and universities, and private institutions of higher learning. We make higher education work.
     
     The nine states of the Northeast – Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania – comprise a union-dense region of the country with substantial cross-state overlap in our higher ed labor markets. We believe it is time for a regional bargaining strategy to leverage the power of workers across job categories and institutions to raise the standards of work, learning, research, care, and the integrity of educational programs in our higher ed and academic medical systems. We unite around the worker-centered vision for the future of higher ed outlined in this Compact. Over the coming years, we believe we can secure significant wins on the following key issues by coordinating demands and organizing strategies. Higher ed union locals in ME, NH, VT, MA, RI, CT, NY, NJ, and PA can sign on to the Compact & get involved in ongoing coordination and organizing.
     
     Further, we hope that this effort can form the basis of a national approach to align bargaining and contract organizing strategies across the sector. Core areas of coordinated bargaining for higher ed unions include the following:
     
     Protecting and Expanding Collective Bargaining Rights: We must protect, defend, and expand collective bargaining rights for all who work on campus.
     
     Fair Compensation: In a time of marked inflation and spiraling wealth inequality, we need fair pay for all higher ed workers with an eye towards eliminating inequities and attending to our lowest paid, most vulnerable members. Bargaining demands could aim to:
     • Ensure rates of compensation for all higher ed workers – regardless of job type – that keep up with or exceed increases in cost of living and account for the experience and expertise gained by time in service to an institution.
     • Insist that every higher ed worker should be paid enough to live where they work.
     • Require equal pay for equal work; part-time workers should be paid at the same rate as their full-time counterparts for equivalent duties, including but not limited to adjunct faculty.
     • Actively redress historical salary inequities, and ensure that our contracts do not contribute to producing or exacerbating such inequities.
     • Address salary compression and inversion.
     • Minimize managerial discretion and control over the distribution of union-negotiated salary and compensation money.
     • Strengthen protections against wage theft and establish fair rates and policies for overtime, extra-service compensation, compensatory time, on-call/recall pay, holiday pay, inconvenience pay for nights/weekends, hazard pay, and other forms of occupation-specific compensation.
     • Ensure that all labor is compensated; institutions of higher learning have long run on volunteer unpaid labor.
     • Work to expand the resources available for bargaining and compensation by challenging the patterns, parameters, or structures that management has used to shield institutional wealth and state resources.
     • Bargain methods to insist on union access to demographic member information to ensure that forms of social discrimination and oppression are not being reproduced in salary and compensation.
   • Strengthening Job Security and Fair Working Conditions: We must end the crises of precarity, contingency, and outsourcing by bargaining durable job security and paths to permanency for higher education workers. Bargaining demands could aim to:
     • Ensure pathways to permanent employment for all higher ed workers who want it.
     • Defend and expand tenure and job permanency.
     • Expand access to full-time positions.
     • Increase job security for existing contingent workers, such as longer appointment lengths, more stable employment, and strong conversion procedures, including conversion from part-time to full-time employment where desired.
     • Eliminate or minimize the role that student “evaluations” of teaching play in employment decisions for instructional faculty.
     • Strengthen union due process rights and contract grievance procedures.
     • Strengthen union protections of bargaining unit work against privatization, outsourcing, or contracting-out.
     • Create and strengthen protections against retrenchment including pathways to rehiring and training.
     • Create and strengthen mechanisms to preserve disciplinary and institutional integrity in the face of increasing efforts to cut or restructure departments, programs, and units.
     • Establish and enforce seniority rights as a way to secure more stable employment.
     • Strengthen protections against systematic overwork, workload creep, and understaffing, such as codifying minimum staffing levels, guaranteeing class size caps, and more.
     • Ensure that employees have access to remote work opportunities where appropriate and desirable.
   • Expanding Accessible Health Care & Benefits: Healthcare is a human right and all workers should have the ability to retire with dignity. We need access to quality medical care, and guaranteed benefits including employer contributions to retirement. Bargaining demands could aim to:
     • Guarantee quality, affordable, continuous health benefits across workloads for all workers and retirees, including part-time and contingent workers, with reasonable health benefits costs including but not limited to employee share of premium, copays, and deductibles.
     • Ensure access to healthcare providers including mental healthcare providers and supplemental insurance, and including coverage in more rural areas or “health-care deserts.”
     • Expand union access to information about healthcare providers and plans for transparency in health coverage.
     • Expand union representation in healthcare governance and decision making, including rights to data about utilization, claims, pricing and payment.
     • Ensure that health benefits include the right to comprehensive sexual and reproductive care and gender-affirming care, including for minors.
   • Paid Leave Rights and Protections: All workers need paid leave rights and protections for health, personal, family, and professional reasons. Bargaining demands could aim to:
     • Ensure that all leaves are subject to job protections and anti-retaliation provisions.
     • Strengthen access to necessary paid leave time, including sick leave, universal equitable parenting leave for both parents for a period of at least one year, family leave, bereavement leave, and other personal time for all workers, with particular attention to those holding contingent and outside-funded positions.
     • Secure fully paid, parental leave that can be flexibly configured to meet the particular needs of employees, particularly those working on academic calendars to help alleviate the social and institutional pressure to choose between career and family.
     • Grant autonomy to workers to define “family” for the purposes of leave provisions.
     • Seek to eliminate provisions and policies that necessitate reporting to the employer invasive, unnecessary, and sensitive health conditions or statuses.
     • Allow workers to flexibly pause their permanency, appointment length, and/or tenure clock in coordination with all leave provisions without prejudice to any and all job protections and compensation.
     • Expand support for caregivers, including but not limited to child care and elder care.
     • Protect and expand sabbatical leave to all employees.
   • Supporting Research, Professional Development and Career Advancement: Higher education is predicated on establishing and maintaining expertise. Our jobs, therefore, require employer support for academic research and professional development. We likewise believe that all higher ed workers should have access to useful and fulfilling jobs with career ladders for promotion and opportunity as they grow. Higher ed workers whose jobs depend on external funding make critical contributions and deserve institutional support and job security protections. Bargaining demands could aim to:
     • Ensure that higher ed workers have career growth and promotional opportunities (with regular, predictable salary increases) and institutional support necessary to achieve those opportunities.
     • Increase resources for professional development, including but not limited to conference participation, publication, licensure and certification, course development, professional development, and other required, but uncompensated parts of higher educational work.
     • Create and strengthen provisions around bridge funding and hard-money institutional commitments for externally funded employees.
   • Academic Freedom: Academic freedom stands on the foundation of job security for all higher education workers. We need stronger protections for academic freedom and freedom of speech, which are both under threat at this moment. Bargaining demands could aim to:
     • Protect and expand academic freedom and freedom of speech protections for all workers, including non-citizens, engaging in “extramural” political or controversial speech.
     • Insist that all higher ed workers need “freedom to teach, to learn, to research.”
     • Enshrine academic freedom language in contracts rather than through institutional definitions or statements to ensure stability and enforceability.
     • Insist that worker control of the institution is an academic freedom question. Higher ed workers should have control over curriculum, disciplines, institutional priorities, financial management, etc.
   • Creating A Safe and Healthy Workplace: Guaranteeing a safe workplace for all has been a foundational achievement of unions. Expanding that principle to ensure that all higher ed workers feel safe in our workplaces is and essential principle of higher ed unionism today. Bargaining demands could aim to:
     • Establish joint Health and Safety committees with oversight authority over the infrastructural, physical, and environmental health considerations at our workplaces.
     • Strengthen protections against all forms of harassment and discrimination, ideally by making such protections grievable.
     • Increase support for programs designed to recruit, retain and recognize the additional barriers faced by workers of color, women, queer and trans, Indigenous, non-citizen, workers with disabilities, and other marginalized, oppressed, or vulnerable communities.
     • Increase support for non-citizen workers who are facing unprecedented threats, including assistance with visas and immigration paperwork, emergency funding, immigration-related leave, leniency (e.g., opportunities for remote work) if employment delays stem from immigration difficulties, and more.
   • Centering Workers in Implementing New Technology: As AI and other emerging technologies are increasingly integrated into our workplaces, higher ed workers must determine how they are implemented to mitigate potential harm to workers, students, and the communities we serve. Bargaining demands could aim to:
     • Strengthen job protection language to prevent the loss (in whole or part) of jobs due to AI automation.
     • Ensure that workers are able to make decisions about whether, when, and how to use AI in essential job duties.
     • Strengthen provisions for intellectual property, likeness, and data privacy.
     • Require notice and transparency about how AI systems and related technologies are being used by the employer.
     • Establish worker protections to ensure that AI systems are not being given a primary role in high-stakes employment decisions including hiring, renewal, promotion, or non-renewal/termination.
   • Caring for Our Communities—Bargaining for the Common Good: To build the institutions of higher learning that our students deserve, we need institutions that invest in and strengthen local communities. Bargaining demands could aim to:
     • Establish local hiring initiatives to mitigate gentrification and displacement.
     • Expand public access to campus infrastructure, including research, education, and healthcare.
     • Increase support for public transportation infrastructure (e.g., free or subsidized passes).
     • Expand commitments to public childcare initiatives.
     • Defend the importance of public “safety net” hospitals and teaching hospitals as a public good.
     • Commit higher ed institutions to expand their role in communities, helping to expand access to housing, healthcare, food security, and employment opportunities.
     • Commit to debt-free higher education of the highest quality as a right for all members of the community.
   • We, as signatories to the Amherst Compact, collectively authored during the January 2026 HELU Northeast Regional Bargaining Summit, commit to advancing the principled demands itemized above. Working together as a higher education labor movement, we will coordinate bargaining demands, actions, and organizing efforts. We understand that each of our unions works within a particular bargaining context and has the obligation to address the needs of its members; however, we also understand that the bold vision of higher education outlined in this Compact cannot be achieved by any individual unit alone. We pledge our unions to the coordinated project of advancing the bargaining platform demands above, and working to attain a labor- centered vision of higher education as a social good.
   • Motion 2026.03.20-02
     • Move to add APA’s Endorsement to The Amherst Compact to Coordinate Higher Education Bargaining in the Northeast 2026.
     • by: R. Taormina 2nd by: R. Ramirez-McKinley
     • Vote: 9-0-2 Action: Motion Carries
2. Purchase of additional Google accounts (Taormina)
   • Asking to add nine additional Gmail accounts for the individual chapter grievance officers. It would cost $1606.50/year if we pay up front.
   • Motion 2026.03.20-03
     • Move to purchase nine (9) additional Gmail accounts for the individual chapter grievance officers.
     • by: R. Taormina 2nd by: M. Powers
     • Vote: 5-3-1 Action: Motion Carries
   • Motion 2026.03.20-04
     • Move to annualize payment for all Gmail accounts.
     • by: R. Taormina 2nd by: S. McNeil
     • Vote: Unanimous Action: Motion Carries
3. Dues and Reimbursement Policy Proposals (Taormina)
   • APA/MTA/NEA Dues Refund Policy
     • This policy shall be utilized when determining  a member’s eligibility for a dues refund.
       • Membership coordinators must confirm the number of hours an employee is working as part of the onboarding process.
     • Members are ultimately responsible for confirming their dues deductions are correct. Should they find an error, the member must contact their local Chapter President immediately. The Chapter President will notify the Association President, Treasurer, and Membership Coordinator to request a refund.
     • MTA/NEA/APA dues rates will be announced annually as updated.
     • Refunds will not be offered beyond the current fiscal year (July 1 to June 30).
     • Refund requests must be submitted to the Association Treasurer no later than July 30.
   • Motion 2026.03.20-05
     • Move to adopt a Dues Refund Policy to address an individual member’s dues refunds.
     • by: R. Taormina 2nd by: S. McNeil
     • Vote: Unanimous Action: Motion Carries
   • Stipend/Reimbursement/Refund Policy
     • Stipends, reimbursements or refunds incurred within the current fiscal year (July 1 – June 30), must be submitted to the Association Treasurer no later than July 30.
     • Motion 2026.03.20-06
       • Move to adopt a Stipend/Reimbursement/Refund Policy.
       • by: R. Taormina 2nd by: S. McNeil
       • Vote: Unanimous Action: Motion Carries

Institutional Issues

Information has been redacted.

Announcements

1. None.

Adjournment

1. Motion to Adjourn made at 11:47 am
   • by: R. Taormina 2nd by: R. Shersnow
   • Vote: Unanimous Action: Motion Carries

APA Meeting Schedule 2025-2026:

Event	Time	Date	Format	Location
APA Executive Board	10:00am	Friday, September 19, 2025	Hybrid	Zoom/Worcester
APA Executive Board	9:00am	Friday, October 17, 2025	Remote	Zoom
APA Executive Board	10:00am	Friday, November 21, 2025	Hybrid	Zoom/Worcester State University
Annual State-wide Membership	12:00pm	Friday, November 21, 2025	Hybrid	Zoom/Worcester State University
APA Executive Board	10:00am	Friday, December 19, 2025	Hybrid	Zoom/Worcester
APA Executive Board	10:00am	Friday, January 16, 2026	Hybrid	Zoom/Worcester
APA Executive Board	9:00am	Friday, February 20, 2026	Remote	Zoom
APA Executive Board	9:00am	Friday, March 20, 2026	Remote	Zoom
APA Executive Board	9:00am	Friday, April 17, 2026	Remote	Zoom
APA Executive Board	9:00am	Friday, May 15, 2026	Remote	Zoom
APA Executive Board	10:00am	Friday, June 19, 2026	Hybrid	Zoom/Worcester