Teachers' Contract: We Can Save Millions

It is confession time.

Many people who have read my writing would probably think that I am a rabid anti-union Person. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I grew up in a very left-wing home, the son of a teacher and a social worker. I have all the words of all the Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs songs memorized. I listen to them every day. I have studied the history of the Unions from Eugene Debs, to the Triangle fire and the steel and mining strikes I believe in the necessity of unions to keep abuses of management in check.

But… having said that, as in the Monty Python skit of Dennis Moore who took so much from the rich to give to the poor that the poor had become rich. We have gone too far in our teachers union contracts throughout the state.

The pay and the benefits are out of whack with what is fair and sustainable.  And it will change. It will change because has to change because just like the pensions had to change, because the structure cannot be maintained. It can be addressed in the next contract or if we want to kick the can down the road the one after that.

But 6 years is as long as I give it until the system of teacher compensation will crush all of us under its own weight. It is not an issue anymore if the teachers should make that money. They can’t.

This side of the pyramid can’t support the ever-increasing salaries. Either we address the contract or start laying off teachers enmasse and teach classes online.

Now of everything in our schools, the most important component is the teachers. Our students come from an affluent background and the parents are involved and this helps, but without the teachers it would not mean spit. And there are dozens of things that could be better and fairer.

We should pay more money for science and math teachers than social studies and language arts teachers not because science and math are more important, but
because there are less science and math teachers available. That is supply and
demand.

But good teachers are at the crux of the matter. And there is no shortage of teachers out there. The last numbers I read showed that 70% of certified
teachers cannot find jobs teaching. That is 70%, 7 out of 10 teachers want jobs!
And this week our colleges minted hundreds more teachers who can’t find a job.

When you have a surplus of applicants, you don’t have to pay as much for good employees. Why is public education the only system that breaks that rule?

Below is a list of items I would change in the contract. It is not by any means a complete list. It is a combination of what I consider the most important and the most obvious. But rest assured that the school committee will not incorporate any suggestion I have into their plans. (Why spoil a perfect record?)

But I get this space to write for free and Patch readers say I am the “most popular blog” (see sidebar). So why not write my ideas down and have them ignored anyway.

First and foremost, I believe that no teacher should take a cut in pay. Period.  It is bad for employee morale to cut someone’s pay. Especially when great savings long term can be obtained without cutting pay. No teacher should take a cut in pay. (I said it twice for effect) In fact, I would recommend giving every teacher a 3% raise minimum each year. Some years they should get more than a 3% raise. And this will still save us thousands of dollars a year.

Okay, let’s look at the contract. Here are the items I would cut to save money.

Article 7: Teacher tuition reimbursement

We need to stop providing teachers with reimbursement for getting higher education. Almost every study shows there is no connection between higher degrees and better teachers.  Many teachers take extra classes in order to earn credits to move up the pay scale in appendix A of the Contract (More about that later) the school committee in a recent vote demonstrated that they question the value of higher degrees (more on that later also.) There is evidence of the value of professional development. We should concentrate on that. This would save $50,000.

Article 10 section 4: Sick leave

Currently teachers who work only 39 weeks a year, remember, get 15 paid sick days and 4 personal days. That is 4 weeks of paid time off. And the line between personal and sick often blurs. I know several teachers who use the sick days as personal days. I knew one teacher years ago who bragged to me that, with Monday holidays she could take off almost  every Monday to spend three-day weekends in New York with her family. Cut Personal and sick days down to 10 Paid days off total. Leave in the clause that in the contract already case of a major illness that the school committee can decide to pay the teacher anyway.  And if teachers need more time off let them take the time off, just deduct their pay the already contracted rate 1/187 of their salary per day. That will help pay for substitutes. Currently we pay substitutes $400,000 if we instituted this policy I would guess we would save $100,000 conservatively. Could be more but better safe without the numbers.

Article 10 Section 5: Sabbatical leave.

This is where we pay teachers 50% of their pay for not working. I couldn’t find it in the budget, but I am going out on a limb that we shouldn’t pay anyone to not work. I have always believed that.  Call me crazy.

Article 11 Section 5: Department heads at the high school.

Department heads at the high school are paid an extra stipend for their duties -- about $4,000 year each. Plus they get 2 extra classes off per day. Read that as .4 FTE less that each department head works, and gets paid extra. I went to the web site and counted 14 departments at the high school. Assume we could find a way to reduce 10 of those to 1 period off per day. We would save 2.0 FTEs. The woodworking teacher is one FTE and would save $100,000 so 2 FTEs would save $200,000. I am sure it is not that simple, that there is more to it and I am just reading the contract, but there is savings to be had there, I am sure.

Article 5.1

A classroom teacher who receives and maintains certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and continues teaching in Barrington shall receive a stipend in the amount of three thousand five hundred dollars ($3,500). Just eliminate this.

Now we come to the big money.

Appendix A.

In this section teachers get different monies depending on their level of education. There are 6 categories: Bachelor’s degree, B+36 Master’s degree, M+15, M+30, and CAGS.

As I stated before there is no evidence that higher degrees produce better teachers. I know that the school committee believes this to be true based on their recent choice for superintendent. Mike Messorre was chosen based on his ability and his character and his institutional knowledge. The school committee passed over two highly qualified candidates who had PHDs. If that was not an automatic requirement for superintendent, then why are we automatically giving a raise to teachers with higher levels of education regardless of subject matter or ability? What is good for the goose is good for the gander. If the superintendent does not need a PHD, why should we push for the average teacher to be a PHD? Let’s just have them all be good teachers, regardless of education level.

For each of those educational levels, the teachers get a raise of between $600 and $2,500. This is on top of the annual increase teachers receive every year. We need to reduce this to only one bump for getting their masters only. Then after attrition in a few years we would save about $3,000-4,000 per teacher or almost a million dollars! No cutting of pay. Just the old teachers will retire and the new ones won’t get the bump. A lot of teachers would stop taking extra classes at RIC after that.

Also in Appendix A is the longevity bonus. Each teacher gets an extra bonus at the completion of 15, 20, 25, and 30 years. These add $5,700 to the longest serving teachers’ pay. Keep the longevity bonus and make it only $500 instead of the $1350-1500 and eventually it would save $400,000 a year.

Lastly in "appendix a" are the step increases. This is the big one! Teachers
start at $40,000 a year and that doubles in 10 years. For doing the same job, if
there is no pay increase!

With a pay increase it comes closer to tripling! Step increases are mandated by law so we must give them and all teachers get a raise over and above their regular raise their first 10 years. In Barrington step increases range from $1,300-$9,000+ per year. If we gave teachers step increases of $500 per year instead of $1,300-9,000, we would save a base pay of $32,500 per teacher. Eventually all teachers would be effected. There are 278 teachers. In
30 years, the base pay savings would be 32,500x278. Or it would be a base
savings of $10,456,136.

That is 25% of our budget! There it is folks. That's where are money goes. That is why your property taxes go up every year.

The current plan is to reduce the salary increase to maybe 2% or 1.5%.
This number is irrelevant. 20% health care co pay? It sounds nice but it doesn’t
matter really. These numbers are political numbers. Giving teachers raises each
year is not the problem. The school department will claim to negotiate don’t
concentrate on the 3% raise. Give them the 3% raise! But mark my words if we do % or 2.6% as a negotiated victory. It is not! Fix the structural problems with
the steps and the longevity, or we will be cutting teachers and programs for
the rest of the time our children are in school! And out taxes will continue to
go up!

And don’t let the schools tell you that we will lose good teachers. Good teachers are not in it for the money, and any who would go to Providence for $5,000 more a year is not a good teacher. And remember there are 70% unemployed teachers. Offer more for math and science and a couple of foreign languages and maybe special ed, depending on supply, but there is big money to
be saved!

What I am advocating is reducing the few programs above (there could be more there are a lot of ups and extras in the budget but this is long
enough).

DO NOT CUT any existing teachers’ pay! Give all teachers a 3% raise+ give teachers in the first 10 years a step bonus of $500 per year. Give teachers in year 15, 20, 25 and30 a $500 raise each year on top of the 3%.

No pay cuts. Everyone gets a raise of 3% or more. Not bad in financial hard times don’t you think? And we would after 10 years or so save $4 million to $5 million. We could keep the teachers and the programs we want and save the town from ruinous tax increases every year to maintain a flawed structural contract designed to fail... and will fail.

What I have suggested will never happen. There is not the moral or political will. But that is how to do it. But if Barrington schools have led in graduation requirements. They have led in co-pays for teachers health costs. But if they really want to be leaders, this or a variation is the way if anyone has the guts to try.

If you made it to the end, congratulations, and thank you for your patience!