Jim Thorpe has finally settled on a contract with its teachers after two and a half years of negotiations.

The board voted 8-0, with one abstention, to approve a contract with the Jim Thorpe Education Association at its meeting Monday night.The association’s 150 teachers voted to approve the contract earlier in the day.The contract officially runs from 2013-2018. The teachers have been working under their previous contract, up until this point.Teachers’ union president David Marino said he hopes that both sides can put the negotiation behind them, and get back to work.“We’re just ready to move on. It’s a good deal for both sides, it’s a compromise,” Marino said.Marino acknowledged that there had been some frustration over a failure to get a deal done.Up until a recent negotiation session that sealed the deal, it had been weeks since the two sides sat down to discuss terms. But he said that in the end, the two were able to work together and form a deal.“What I told the association was, ‘We can dwell on two years and eight months of hard negotiations, or dwell on the last five hours of negotiations.” Marino said.“The last five hours were positive and professional, and that’s when the deal got done. That’s what I’m going to think about,” he added.The deal includes yearly pay increases for teachers in the last three years of the deal.Both sides said that the major key to settling the contract was teachers giving concessions in their health coverage. That includes imposing a deductible on their plans, and having teachers pay a larger share of their prescription costs.“We know health care costs for the district are pretty high, and we worked with the district to help alleviate those costs,” Marino said.All told, the contract will cost the district an additional $2.375 million through 2018. But that includes the district’s contribution to the Pennsylvania State Employees Retirement System, which neither side can control.Without the raises, those costs alone would have been $1 million, district business manager Lauren Kovac said.Board member Walter Schulz abstained from the vote. He said he was not opposed to the contract, but did not have enough information about the contract to vote.After they approved the contract, board members said they were shifting their focus to the district’s Act 93 administrators, who have been working without a contract since the end of the 2013-14 school year.“I said when we’re done with the teachers, we’re going to come for you. Just so you didn’t think we forgot,” board member Robert Schaninger said.