Pay rising for county district's teachers

Beginning salary going up $2,000

In this file photo Bill Goff (left) and Jerry Guess, CFO and Superintendent respectively of the Pulaski County Special School District, answer questions during a meeting of the state Board of Education concerning the district's fiscal distress.
In this file photo Bill Goff (left) and Jerry Guess, CFO and Superintendent respectively of the Pulaski County Special School District, answer questions during a meeting of the state Board of Education concerning the district's fiscal distress.

Teachers in the Pulaski County Special School District are getting on average a 3.2 percent, across-the-board pay increase for the coming school year, the first increase to the district's salary schedule since the 2010-11 school year.

When combined with step increases for an additional year of work experience, the average increase will rise to 4.5 percent, Chief Financial Officer Bill Goff said Tuesday.

Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key, who acts as the school board for the state-controlled district that the state has determined is in fiscal distress, approved the pay plan after the district's state-appointed Community Advisory Board voted last week to recommend it to him. The plan is designed to boost the salaries of new teachers in particular.

Superintendent Jerry Guess said Tuesday that the 17,000-student district has given nonrecurring bonuses to employees in recent years in lieu of raising salaries. The district has about 1,250 teachers.

"Our intention was to right the district financially to get the district into a position where an adjustment to the salary schedule could be responsibly considered," Guess said about the now permanent increases to employee salaries.

"We believe we are at that point," he said.

The teacher pay increases, which will cost about $3.2 million, are coming at a time in which the commissioner has also approved awarding salary credit to support-staff members for all of their relevant job experience prior to their district employment. Previously, the district limited salary credit to no more than 10 years of outside experience.

As a result of the new teacher pay plan, the beginning salary for a teacher with a bachelor's degree and no experience will increase from $32,175 to $34,106 this school year. The annual, 190-day salary for a teacher with a master's degree and five years of experience is increasing from $41,937 to $44,906. The top salary in the district -- for a doctorate and at least 16 years of experience -- is $69,206, up from $68,814.

The newly approved teacher salary schedule is being changed from an "indexed" schedule based on percentage increments, or steps, to a schedule with fixed-dollar increments for employee experience and employee education, Goff said.

With the indexed-salary schedule, where the percentage spread between cells in the salary schedule was the same, a $1,000 increase to the beginning teacher salary would require greater increases to teachers with more education and more experience, making the actual average increase about $1,500, Goff said.

After this transition year to the new fixed-dollar schedule, the dollar amount added to the beginning teacher salary will be the same dollar amount increase to every cell in the salary schedule.

School district leaders were motivated to change to the fixed-dollar schedule because it is a more affordable way to increase beginning teacher salaries so they are more competitive with beginning salaries in nearby school systems, Goff said.

Those districts are Benton, Bryant, Cabot, Conway, Little Rock and North Little Rock. The beginning salaries in those districts ranged from $34,510 to $40,575 and averaged $37,268 last school year, while the Pulaski district's starting salary was $32,175.

"We are so far behind with beginning teacher salaries compared to those other districts," Goff said.

"This is a 6 percent increase for a beginning teacher," Goff said about the increase for the coming year in the Pulaski County Special district. "That moves us from 86.33 percent of the average of the other six districts to 91.52 percent of the average. That is being done with a gain right at $2,000.

"If we kept the old salary schedule in place, that $2,000 increase on the beginning teacher would have averaged about $3,000, and therefore would have been much more expensive for the district," he said. "The district would not have been able to increase the beginning teacher pay by as much and stay within that 3.2 percent increase."

Goff said the Pulaski Special district compares much more favorably to the other six districts in terms of pay to its veteran teachers.

The average top pay in the six districts was $65,668 last year compared with $68,814 in the Pulaski County Special district. The Pulaski County Special's average is 104.79 percent of the average of the other districts.

Goff said that with the newly approved pay schedule, should the high-end salaries begin to falter in comparison with neighboring districts, pay adjustments can be made without reconfiguring the entire schedule.

Teachers in the district last received an across-the-board pay increase in the 2010-11 school year. That was a 2 percent raise.

The district, which had been classified earlier as fiscally distressed because of management problems reported in a state audit, was taken over by the state in June 2011.

Its locally elected School Board was dismissed and the superintendent was replaced with a state-appointed chief. In the years after the takeover, district employees have received nonrecurring bonuses. Eligible employees also received yearly increments for an additional year of work experience.

Pulaski County Special is the only school district in Pulaski County so far to provide for across-the-board raises for the coming school year.

The North Little Rock School Board recently approved a salary schedule for the coming school year that is virtually identical to the schedule for this past academic year.

The Little Rock School District, under state control for academic distress reasons, recently distributed bonuses to teachers for this past school year and has not acted on salary issues for the coming school year.

Across-the-board pay increases have not been recommended to or approved by the state education commissioner for the Pulaski County Special district's support staff for the coming school year, Goff said Tuesday.

But many of the employees will benefit from recent revisions in their salary schedules to add more steps for experience, enabling employees to receive increases for their additional year of work experience, he said.

Additionally, the state education commissioner has approved the recommendation from the district and its Personnel Policies Committee that employees be placed on the salary schedule step that accurately reflects their years of experience in relevant jobs prior to their district employment.

The change in placement on the schedule and the accompanying increases in pay this new school year will affect 329 employees -- about one-fourth of the classified workforce in the district -- at a cost of about $1.2 million, Goff said.

A Section on 07/01/2015

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