Since the TUSD board passed a $4.4 million package of pay raises Tuesday, I’ve been bothered by the way the money was divided among TUSD staff, because teachers got a significantly lower percentage raise than administrators and classified staff (classified staff are, basically, everyone who’s not a teacher or an administrator). Teachers got a $500 raise across the board regardless of their current salary. That means a beginning teacher received about a 1.5 percent pay boost while teachers near the top of the pay schedule got more like one percent. Everyone else, administrators and classified staff, got a 2.5 percent raise. A few people were excluded from the raises entirely, but for everyone else, that’s how it worked.
Why did teachers get a significantly lower percentage raise than everyone else? That doesn’t sit right with me, and based on what I’ve seen and heard in discussions on Facebook and elsewhere, it doesn’t sit right with others either.
So I asked Superintendent H.T. Sanchez to explain the discrepancy in the raises, which he did in some detail. Since I wasn’t a fly on the wall during the meetings where the raises were worked out and I don’t claim to be an expert on district administrative matters (I was a classroom teacher, and I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to administrative stuff except when it affected me or my colleagues directly), I can’t say whether the facts as he presented them give an accurate or complete picture of the process. So I’m going to summarize what Sanchez explained to me and leave it to commenters to discuss whether they think his explanation is adequate.
Sanchez told me the raises were negotiated with the unions representing TUSD employees: the teachers union, the administrators union and a few unions representing classified staff. No one was popping champagne corks when the deal was concluded — it’s not a hell of a lot of money for anyone, especially since raises have been few and far between for years — but they all agreed to the deal.
The reason teachers got a significantly lower raise than the others, according to Sanchez, is because about 1,600 TUSD teachers had already benefited recently from fixes made to teacher salaries. There was a problem with salary compression. Some of the yearly step raises in the salary schedule were so small as to be almost insignificant, and those were increased. Also, some teachers who came into the district with previous experience ended up with higher salaries than TUSD teachers with the same amount of experience, and that problem was corrected as well. According to Sanchez, those salary adjustments — they can’t be called raises since they didn’t affect all teachers — added $5 million a year to the amount spent on teacher salaries. Neither administrators nor classified staff got similar adjustments.
When it came time to negotiate the current raises, teachers, because they already had that $5 million added to their salaries, got a lower percentage raise than administrators and classified staff. The raises totaled about $2 million each for teachers and classified staff. About $300,000 went to administrators’ raises because there are far fewer administrators than other staff.
Sanchez expressed confidence that the $4.4 million in raises will be sustainable into the future, which was a concern Mark Stegeman raised during the board meeting. Sanchez said all that could change if the state legislature makes some significant, negative changes in the way it funds school districts, which is always possible and could alter the district’s financial situation in unforeseeable ways. The nightmare scenario is if the legislature decides to sweep up districts’ surplus funds to help balance the state budget, which would cause big problems for TUSD.
A final point — and this is my observation, not Sanchez’s. So far as I know, these raises weren’t mandated, nor are they part of standard contract negotiations. They’re an attempt by TUSD to improve its employees’ salaries across the board. And while I think it’s reasonable to question the size of the raises to administrators, who received the highest dollar-figure raises, it’s important to remember that classified staff, who are generally the lowest paid employees in the district, got a much-needed 2.5 percent salary boost. Given the deplorably inadequate state funding of schools, anything that involves money is always too little and comes too late. The raises aren’t enough, they’re less than district employees deserve, but they’re something.
This article appears in Dec 11-17, 2014.
Wouldn’t it have made a much better showing if the lower paid teachers received a higher percentage increase, than the higher paid and higher raised administrators?
They “found” $4.4M on an ongoing basis?
Where have the funds come from?
Giving a higher %age to classified workers, such as teacher aides, still does not reflect a large amount because their base salary is so low. Also to be considered is their working hours are shorter than salaried employees. For an example, an $11 and change/hour teacher aide would receive before taxes about $8 a week more under this new 2.5% raise. For a site administrator making about $70K for 12 months, a 1% raise would give them about $58/month over 12 months. Quite a difference.
I think they actually get more than $70K for approximately 7.5 to 8 months.
But hey…what a few months?
Just as “We don’t want to” doesn’t constitute a legal argument (about the State paying back TUSD and other districts the money that it has been stealing over the years) Sanchez’ “We will have the money” doesn’t constitute financial security. In fact, it is amazing to me how often his words, like the Kool Aid they represent, work as a palliative for otherwise thinking and analytical people. That said, its obvious that the teachers and the rest of the site based staff desperately need more for what they do. Why a person who works with columns of numbers makes more than a person who teaches a classroom of children, or drives a bus full of children, is a mystery to me. One profession makes more money for someone, the other makes more of a future for many. The salary difference is obviously arbitrary and not based on any real sense of value.
If you were at or listening to the meeting, you might have noticed that the vote revolved around framing more than anything. As usual, Stegeman was set up as being anti-worker on this vote, when his comments actually reflected that selling this package as a secure one was the problem, not this years’ raise. As it is, the Board votes on the annual raises, so I suspect that although none of the sitting members had the cojones to admit it, they ultimately voted for Stegeman’s proposal and not theirs. That is, he proposed a payout this year without making commitments for the following years because there is no reason to believe that we will have the money. In the future, school funding being what it is in Arizona, voting for teacher/staff salaries may well depend on what programs or buildings the school board is willing to close to maintain them. Given their past turnarounds on school closures and some of their statements on MAS, when the going gets rough, teachers/site staff may well be the losers.
Finally, it would be interesting to know if anyone suggested that the raises only apply to those below a certain level of salary. The complicated discussion that Safier cites about compression etc. should have been accompanied by a similar conversation about raises that Directors and others have received as their positions were re-posted (there has been a HUGE turnover at 1010) and (unapproved) $10,000 bonuses they are getting this year for the first time in their contracts. But that wouldn’t have been Kool-Aid.
(Sorry for such a long post!)
Great idea Michael. Thanks.
“Why a person who works with columns of numbers makes more than a person who teaches a classroom of children, or drives a bus full of children, is a mystery to me. “
This point of view is a mystery to me. The answer is because there are more available teachers and bus drivers than accountants. Want to make more money than a teacher? Go into accounting. Not saying it’s fair or right: teachers should make enough to support themselves. They have a union to help with that.
Compensation is based on supply and demand, not arbitrary opinions of value. Teachers are wonderful, but who is to say teaching adds so much more value to society than accounting? The bean counters get no respect, but Accounting is necessary to the existence of all organizations. Double-entry book-keeping was one of the inventions that led to the establishment of modern trade and the subsequent Renaissance.
Supt. Sanchez seems like a bright guy, so he will probably learn OTJ how TUSD works. I am curious to see how he holds up in the long-term, and whether he is really serious about making a positive difference in a district that needs such a bottom-to-top makeover overall. Buena suerte.
bslap said, “Compensation is based on supply and demand, not arbitrary opinions of value.” That statement is not only incredibly naive, but out of touch with reality. Teachers and nurses are skilled professionals. Their low pay has little to do with supply and demand. There is not an oversupply of K-12 teachers, especially in math and science. The supply is low and demand high because of the low pay. If pay was based on supply and demand, then math and science teachers would be very well paid. Teachers and nurses have traditionally been underpaid because their ranks have been mostly populated by women. To the contrary, arbitrary opinions of value do play a large part.
And then there is, “Teachers are wonderful, but who is to say teaching adds so much more value to society than accounting?” (To be precise, Betts did not say that teaching adds more value than accounting, just asking why accounting is valued so much more than teaching. Big difference.) Bslap’s comment is the explanation for why Arizonan’s elected Diane Douglas. K-12 education is not valued by a majority of people, so why bother thinking too hard about the election choices.
The compression argument is ludicrous. We were never paid. I am owed more than $4,000 by the District, of which $200 has been grudgingly doled out over two years. I will be retired by the time my stolen pay is reimbursed. With the miserly “raise,” my salary will increase by about $11 per paycheck. Look out, Vegas!
Worker shortage is the only way to solve this dilemna. Quit and walk out. That way they will be forced to reorganize and reprioritize their wasteful ways.
Two years tops and problem will be fixed. Or will it?