Rush, C.J.
In 2011, our Legislature made significant amendments to statutes addressing collective bargaining for teachers and their employers. Pursuant to these amendments, when the parties fail to reach a collective bargaining agreement (“CBA”) regarding salaries, wages, and related fringe benefits, the Indiana Education Employment Relations Board (“IEERB”) appoints a mediator. If mediation also fails to produce a CBA, the parties must exchange their last best offers (“LBOs”). The IEERB then appoints a factfinder, who considers certain statutory factors—such as whether an LBO will cause the school corporation to engage in deficit financing—and accordingly selects which side’s LBO to adopt as the CBA for that year. The adopted LBO may not include a provision that conflicts with state or federal law, and a party may appeal the factfinder’s decision to the IEERB.
Here, a teachers association appealed a factfinder’s decision to adopt the school’s LBO. The IEERB affirmed the factfinder, approving a contract provision allowing a superintendent to place teachers hired mid-school-year on any line of an established, bargained-for salary scale. In so doing, the IEERB rejected the teachers association’s claim that the salary flexibility provision unlawfully gave the superintendent unilateral and unfettered discretion over late-hires’ salaries, thereby conflicting with the association’s statutory right to bargain collectively to establish salaries. Given the deferential standard of review afforded to agency action, we conclude the IEERB’s affirmance was lawful. We find that the adopted LBO, including the salary flexibility provision, was, in fact, collectively bargained and that important checks limited the superintendent’s discretion.
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Here, the parties followed this bargaining process through formal collective bargaining, mediation, factfinding, and appeal to the IEERB, ultimately arriving at a CBA for the 2013–2014 school year. Now, they dispute the legality of only one provision in that CBA: the salary flexibility provision. Whether that provision is permissible under the collective-bargaining statutes—as the IEERB concluded—is the narrow question we must now resolve.
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….We conclude, therefore, that the superintendent’s authority was neither unilateral nor unfettered and so did not conflict with the Association’s right to collectively bargain to establish salaries under Indiana Code section 20-29-4-1.
….Consequently, the superintendent could not place a late-hired teacher on a line of the scale if doing so would place the School in deficit financing, further limiting the superintendent’s discretion under this salary flexibility provision. For this reason as well, we disagree with the Association that the salary flexibility provision gives the superintendent unilateral or unfettered discretion—though we note, as did the factfinder, that this provision and others like it are potentially “powerful tool[s] that should be used cautiously and skillfully since [they] could have broad ramifications.”
Conclusion
We hold the Association failed to meet its burden under the AOPA, as it did not show that the IEERB’s decision adopting the School’s LBO was invalid. Rather, we defer to the IEERB’s conclusion that the salary flexibility provision was not unlawful, noting both that the provision in question was collectively bargained and that important checks limited the superintendent’s discretion in establishing late-hires’ salaries. Consequently, we affirm the trial court.
David, Massa, and Slaughter, JJ., concur.
Rucker, J., dissents with separate opinion.
Rucker, J., dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. Indiana Code section 20-29-4-1 provides in relevant part: “School employees may . . . participate in collective bargaining with school employers through representatives of their own choosing . . . to establish, maintain, or improve salaries, wages, salary and wage related fringe benefits . . . .” And Indiana Code section 20-29-6-2(a)(2) provides in relevant part: “Any contract may not include provisions that conflict with . . . school employee rights set forth in IC 20-29-4-1 . . . .” As the Court of Appeals points out the LBO provision authorizing the Superintendent to determine unilaterally the salary of teachers hired after the school year begins “unambiguously, impermissibly conflicts with the Association’s statutory right to collectively bargain to establish salaries under Section 20-29-4-1 and thus violates Section 20-29-6-2(a)(2).” Jay Classroom Teachers Ass’n v. Jay Sch. Corp., 45 N.E.3d 1217, 1226-27 (Ind. Ct. App. 2015). I agree and would thus join my Court of Appeals colleagues in reversing the judgment of the trial court.