Wallingford High School teachers will be able to resume leaving early during final exams week after being ordered to stay for full days in 2025, even though exams end and students go home at 11:55 a.m., according to a new ruling by the State Board of Labor Relations.
According to facts laid out in the decision, high school teachers would typically get to their classes twenty minutes before the start of the school day and leave twenty minutes after the end of the school day, typically around 2:15 p.m.; the additional time is sometimes called “wrap-around” time.
During exam week, however, students leave their classes at 11:55 following completion of the exams, and for the last thirty-four years, teachers have left twenty minutes after the students and were allowed to grade the exams at home before having to turn in the grades on the final day of the school year.
However, in 2025, Lyman Hall High School Principal Joseph Corso sent an email to staff that “Exam days are full teacher workdays,” and that teachers were expected to remain in the building until 2:15 p.m. to work on grading exams and finalizing grades. Sheehan High School Principal Enzo Zocco sent a similar email to Sheehan staff three weeks later outlining the same expectations.
The teachers’ union immediately filed a grievance against the orders, alleging the change essentially extended the work year for teachers beyond past practice without negotiating that extension and without a subsequent pay change for staying those extra hours.
Corso, however, denied the grievance, arguing that teachers were “simply being required to remain on duty for the full contractual work day, not beyond,” and said that although teachers were allowed to leave early after exams in prior years, “any such instance was discretionary and only permitted with permission of administration.”
Local school board members also testified that teachers leaving early on exam weeks were “isolated instances,” but the labor board wrote they were “not persuaded,” after the union produced multiple long-time teachers who “testified to a consistent, open, decades-long practice of permitting high school teachers to leave the building twenty minutes after students, at 12:15 p.m., during final exam week.”
The labor board also found that allowing the teachers to grade final exams from home “is a significant benefit,” because they are not afforded a 30-minute lunch break during the exam day, many of the classrooms are not air conditioned, and the teachers are given a “significant amount of work in a condensed period of time.”
Because the labor contract says nothing about the practice of “wrap-around time, the Labor Board determined that past practice essentially creates a working condition that cannot be unilaterally altered by management but instead must be negotiated with the union.
“In this case, there is no real dispute that teachers’ hours of work, including so-called ‘wrap around’ time are not found in the parties’ collective bargaining agreement,” the decision states. “Hours are a matter of past practice. Since the contract is wholly silent with respect to arrival and departure times, it makes no reference to the subject of the change and cannot serve as a waiver of the Union’s right to bargain that issue.”
The Wallingford Board of Education was required to allow teachers to resume leaving early following the conclusion of exams during exam week and post a copy of their decision in a conspicuous place.
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