DANVILLE — Both sides of the Danville District 118 teachers contract dispute dug more deeply into their positions Friday in the lead-up to a Tuesday meeting with a federal mediator.

In a regularly scheduled media briefing at the Jackson Building in the morning, district administrators and school board president Bill Dobbles defended their handling of talks, which started in April and are threatened as the teachers union becomes eligible Tuesday to call a strike vote.

“It upsets me when the DEA says the school board doesn’t respect teachers,” Dobbles said, who taught in the district for more than 30 years and is a former leader of the teachers union. “We haven’t had a proposal from the DEA since July 12.”

Across town at North Ridge Middle School in the afternoon, Danville Education Association leaders pulled the media aside to challenge that assertion.

“From Day One they said ‘hard freeze,’” said DEA President Robin Twidwell, who at one time served alongside Dobbles as a union rep.

Leaders said a series of union concessions — including last year’s modest salary increase and a package with higher insurance premiums four years ago — had saved the district as much as $10 million.

The union, which represents more than 600 workers, one-third of them uncertified staff, says its last offer was, in fact, in July and included a partial freeze to protect lower-paid workers.

But that’s where the agreeing ends.

Twidwell said despite several counterproposals from the union prior to that date, the board has never wavered on the across-the-board freeze.

“There are no immovable positions,” Dobbles said Friday when asked if the freeze was “un-negotiable.” “Give us something to work with.”

The district says the union plan will cost an extra $1.2 million, something it can’t afford as reflected in the recently passed $2.4 million deficit budget. The union says concessions from last year alone saved the district $700,000.

Superintendent Mark Denman has been steadfast in the district’s protection of more than $15 million in reserves, which he says must be saved as a hedge against continued uncertain state funding. The state is already behind nearly $3 million in aid payments to Danville schools and Denman said using a promised $2.5 million from the recently passed federal “jobs” bill would be foolish until it’s actually received.

“It’s like an inheritance you’ve heard is coming,” he said.

The funds could be released to Illinois by the end of the month, he said, but that doesn’t mean the state will deliver it to school districts — or that it should be given out as salary increases when it arrives.

“We’d welcome the opportunity to have staff called back,” he said. “If we use it as a salary increase, it just adds to the debt. There’s just so much we don’t know.”

And instead of saving money, as the DEA claims its partial-freeze plan would do based on last year’s employee expenditures, the district claims 70 percent of teachers would receive raises ranging from 2.47 to 6 percent. Another 7 percent would receive raises ranging from 1.36 to 2.29 percent, according to the district, and provide raises to teachers making up to $75,000.

Sean Burns, an Illinois Education Association negotiator serving with the Danville team, said the district and union were having a battle of “dueling numbers” and that actually only $500,000 stood between them and a deal.

The union says the district’s team is trying to change the collective bargaining process by eliminating step increases — the system used to reward long-serving teachers — and that it has not put an “alternative compensation” package on the table.

The union already has filed two unfair labor practice complaints with state school officials, both having to do with placing callbacks in new or changed employment positions.

“The district will pay less on its payroll and benefits for DEA members this year than they did a year ago,” Burns said. “We have been dealing with people who have been saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’”

If the district had offered the same deal as last year from the beginning, a step increase for eligible employees and half-percent for others, “We would have said ‘yes’ and we would have settled in April,” he said. “There is no reason why we’re at this point; this should have been settled in April.”

The freeze issue has become a stumbling block for both sides and union officials say there are several “language” issues still to be addressed. Among them, nurse staffing levels and continued pay and benefits for staff members injured in school-discipline cases. They also say those issues were left un-addressed last year in an effort to avoid a strike course after negotiations went through November.

If the salary freeze was accepted, according to a school board statement, employees would not pay additional insurance costs and retirement benefits would stay intact, among a small list of language issues.

In a developing issue, Twidwell said teachers had been closely monitoring “pupil load” numbers in the district and that class sizes were growing because of changes in teacher numbers that started with a reduction in staff last year.

“They’re still shifting staff members around to cover that,” she said.

Most of those 82 teachers have been called back leaving just a total of 15 positions eliminated, but Twidwell said the district is still short nearly 30 teachers.