Educators out of loop as school board ends scheduled raises

By James Rincon

Pflag Reporter

Educators in Pflugerville are speaking out against the district’s 2010-11 Compensation Plan approved 5-1 by the Board of Trustees in May.

The newly adopted model for paying PISD teachers will do away with the current experience-based step schedule in the district, which some say allowed employees to anticipate raises from year to year.

Members of the Pflugerville Educators Association, a group of more than 500 district teachers, said employees affected the most by the board’s decision were cut out of the discussion and are unhappy with the result.

“We called a meeting and all the members with an opinion about it did show up and gave us their views on it,” PEA President Glenda Hickman said. “Everybody felt pretty much the same about it. They were unhappy with it.”

Superintendent Charles Dupre said the compensation plan, which was presented to the district by the Texas Association of School Boards, will allow the district to restore local budgetary control from the grip of expensive legislative mandates.

“One of the biggest issue we face is when the legislature meets and mandates a pay increase. Last year they said every teacher is going to get $1,000 and a step on the schedule. Well, it’s clear in the law that if you don’t have a step-based schedule, then you don’t have to give that extra raise. Now it’s not about not giving money to teachers. It’s about no one in our district got a raise this year except teachers,” Dupre said “Even teachers came to us and said, ‘Can’t we give something to the educational support folks who help us every day in our classroom? Can’t we take some of our money and give them a small raise.’ But our hands were tied by the legislature. In the end what we’re advocating for is local control.”

School board President Carol Fletcher said the modifications will give the district more flexibility when distributing teacher raises.

“It doesn’t mean teachers aren’t getting a raise,” Fletcher said. “It means the legislature can’t come in and say everybody on the step scale has to get x, y or z, which is what they did to us last year.”

Hickman said PISD teachers are have not receive consultation or explanation about how the plan will affect their future raises.

“When they say it gives them more flexibility it naturally makes you think – they don’t need flexibility to give us more pay,” Hickman said. “Mr. Dupre has told us that all teachers will receive a step increase for 2010-11 based on the old step schedule, but that’s as far as he goes. After that we have no idea if we’re going to have to negotiate our pay like new teachers can; if we’re going to have to do extra duties, or if we’re going to be part of a merit system. What is the plan? Where is it? We feel like this should all be spelled out and put in writing before they remove the salary step schedule, and we feel like teachers should be involved in that decision making too.”

Teachers in the district will receive scheduled raises for the coming year according to the old system, and the new compensation plan simply states that from now on teachers entering the district with no prior experience will receive a minimum salary of $41,000, plus stipends for those certified as bilingual or in special education. It also sets a salary cap of $57,350.

“This is confusing to us – the current PISD teachers,” Hickman said. “Can a person with no experience negotiate a salary all the way up to $57,350?”

Dupre said initially the district’s hiring practices will not change, and new hires will not be able to negotiate salaries. However, the 2010-11 Compensation Plan opens the district to the possibility of delving into salary negotiating in the future.

“The whole business of teachers negotiating salary, that is feasible. That could happen way in the future, but in the near term that’s not even something that we’ll be engaging in,” Dupre said. “Is this opening the door for the district to just start cavalierly negotiating salaries and just dispensing special things to certain teachers? No. That is just not going to happen… Any time that we move forward with a change in compensation that would differentiate teacher pay in any way, substantially, that would enable a negotiation or compensation for special performance, that kind of thing, that would require board action. If we step in that direction we would have teachers at the table developing a plan.”

Although Dupre and the board may plan to include teachers in future discussions about changes in compensation formulas, such was not the case for demise of the step schedule.

“At a workshop meeting, the Texas Association or School Boards presented this recommendation to the board and we were there when they presented it and we had a lot of questions then, but we could not ask questions about it,” Hickman said. “We didn’t think they would approve it, but at the next board meeting a week later, the brought it up for approval and they went ahead and approved it.”

Board of Trustees Vice President Elva Gladney cast the lone vote in dissent of the plan’s approval, noting that without proper communication of the changes teachers wouldn’t understand the changes to their compensation and the board would have difficulty explaining it after the fact.

Fletcher said the board should have better communicated with educators the ramifications of the plan so it wouldn’t have taken teachers by surprise. Nevertheless, with the state of funding in the district she said the board did not want to clear the wreckage wreaked from future legislative mandates.

“I will certainly agree that we did not do a good job communicating ahead of time why we would want to do this… We hadn’t really done what we needed to do to make it really transparent. So, I would agree with their position that we haven’t done a good job there,” Fletcher said. “But while we were giving some people fairly large raises we were eliminating 62 positions in the district which we could no longer afford to have and not giving other people any raise at all. We think that those inconsistencies were far more damaging to morale than the idea that instead of having a step schedule, we’ll have another mechanism for trying to distribute raises evenly.”

Still, Hickman said without the step schedule, teacher’s raises may become the easy target for cuts when balancing the budget.

“The teachers in the classroom are the people doing the job that we’re here to do. We’re the ones that are directly affecting the students,” Hickman said. “So if this is the most important job in the district, why do they always look at this one first to cut?”

Fletcher said some of those positions eliminated last year were valuable to day to day campus life.

“We cut a third middle school counselor, science specialist, computer integration technologist – and I don’t think anybody thought that was a good thing to do, but we just didn’t have any choice,” Fletcher said.

Dupre said fear that the plan will reprioritize teacher compensation is unfounded based on the districts record of competitive payment.

“We’ve always done everything we could do to give the largest raise possible. But now that we’re kind of moving in the direction of, there may be some kind of differentiated pay at some point in time – absolutely we’re going to bring people to the table to discuss that,” Dupre said.

jrincon@pflugervillepflag.com