Superintendent Charles I. Ecker's promises last week to try to improve working conditions for Carroll County public school teachers do not appear likely to end a nearly three-month-old work-to-rule job action, teachers union officials said Friday.

"The Carroll County Education Association Representative Assembly appreciates the efforts of the superintendent of schools in his initial response to the concerns enumerated by the teachers of Carroll County," union leaders said.

"We will continue to monitor progress made during the year in alleviating the concerns of teachers," the union said in a statement that more than 45 teachers representing at least 30 schools unanimously approved Thursday evening.

"We thank the parents for their continued support given to teachers and we look forward to working collaboratively to solve the issues," the union said.

Asked whether the time reference - "monitor progress made during the year" - signaled that teachers plan to continue the job action for the rest of the school year, union representative Hal Fox said, "What the representative assembly is saying is that there is no change in status officially because the work-to-rule is not an officially sanctioned action to begin with."

"At this point, what all teachers are looking to see is actual progress," not just a statement of where things stand right now, which is largely what Dr. Ecker's report does," Fox said.

"The representative assembly is looking for some tangible progress on these matters because promises have been made many, many times in the past," he said.

Last month, a task force of teachers and administrators drafted 47 recommendations to improve teachers' working conditions.

Ecker responded Tuesday with a 15-page e-mail to the system's 2,800 employees in which he promised to hire more technicians to maintain school computers, meet every three months with teachers and develop a long-range plan for writing and changing the curriculum.

Many of the task force's other suggestions - such as hiring as many as 181 clerical assistants and not settling for the school district's rank as 24th among the state's 24 school systems in staff-to-student ratio - would require millions of dollars, money that Ecker said the school system most likely would not get from county and state governments during these lean economic times.

Hiring a clerical assistant for each grade level at each school would cost $5.4 million, he said. Getting the school system to the state average in teachers per 1,000 students would require the county to hire 133 teachers at a cost of more than $6 million.

Fox said the union will ask for the task force to be reconvened to review Ecker's response and to continue to work through some of the issues that prompted the job action.