Until the Mars School Board and Mars Area Education Association vote on Nov. 5 on a contract proposal hammered out in recent days, the outcome of the latest bargaining remains in question.

However, the optimism surrounding what has been described as a tentative accord is instructive to other school districts facing talks with their teachers.

The lesson emanating from Mars is that all board members should be willing to join in negotiations when talks become stalemated.

Until Oct. 10, the district had seemed destined for a teachers work stoppage. Teachers, who agreed last year to a one-year wage freeze covering the 2011-12 school year, have been working under terms of their prior contract since June 30.

And until Oct. 10, there were no indications that any substantial progress had been made toward averting a walkout. It had seemed that the summer months might have been squandered in terms of any hard bargaining geared toward reaching a settlement prior to the start of fall classes.

With the lack of progress in place, the union voted on Sept. 26 to authorize a strike, meaning that the majority of teachers gave to their leadership the power to initiate a walkout without further consultation with the membership.

But to its credit the board changed its negotiations tactic. Instead of keeping all of the responsibility for negotiating a settlement on Superintendent William Pettigrew and business manager Jill Swaney, the board on Oct. 9 designated district solicitor Tom King as its head negotiator and decided that all board members would attend future talks.

That allowed board members to witness firsthand and gain a better understanding of all of the considerations involved in the bargaining, enabling the school directors to find possible windows for a settlement that Pettigrew and Swaney alone might not have been able — and might not have felt authorized — to pursue.

At the Oct. 10 bargaining, when the board’s new negotiations strategy first was used, a sense of optimism emerged that a quick settlement might be possible.

In fact, King said Oct. 11 that the Oct. 10 talks were “very productive,” and that eight of the nine school board members had attended the talks the day before and had actively engaged in the negotiations.

When the two sides got together again at the bargaining table on Oct. 15, more progress was achieved, followed by the announcement that a tentative two-year agreement had been worked out.

No doubt Mars taxpayers are looking forward to learning all of the details surrounding the contract and, in some cases might be harboring concern, considering the difficulties that the board encountered in preparing a balanced budget for the 2011-12 and current fiscal years. Regardless of how they might greet the new pact from a monetary standpoint, if it is approved by both sides, taxpayers will have to acknowledge the disruption that a work stoppage would have caused for the district, students and their families.

On the teachers’ side in the bargaining has been the fact that the union was one of few across the state that agreed to the 2011-12 wage freeze requested by Gov. Tom Corbett because of the state’s fiscal problems and those problems’ negative impact on school subsidies.

Whether any of the lost teachers wages from 2011-12 will be made up under the new pact will be evident when details of the agreement are revealed, presumably after the two sides vote, as is customary in school talks.

“I am optimistic it (proposed pact) will pass,” King said, in the aftermath of the Oct. 15 talks.

“Right now, I think we’ve hammered out a fair deal for the teachers and the school district,” said Rob Case, education association president.

If that optimism proves accurate on Nov. 5, both sides will deserve praise for quickly making the new negotiations strategy productive.