Pay levels

Now that the health insurance decisions are winding down; there have been a number of questions on pay levels for next year. These questions seem to be stemming from some information that is floating around that School Boards can now reduce people to the base upon which they started, or some other format of wage reduction.

To start, I am not an expert as to what the new law allows, or does not allow, and we will have to work that out. I have not had time to do anything more than give a cursory reading on some updates and articles. From what I understand, we still need to negotiate the ‘base’ based on some formula. As noted, we will work through that process to fit the legal requirements, but, we will continue to tweak things locally to treat people fairly. Please note that what we actually negotiate as the base is actually just one figure (no matter what it ends up at) and is only part of what can be paid.

I can emphatically say that for next year everyone will be at their same wage plus some amount, to be determined, of a raise. Nobody is going to be reduced to some base level, whatever that might even be, or some other low figure.

However I need to note that you should not count on credits or degrees as counting for anything on the salary chart. If you want to record your educational accomplishments for the file, forward that information to Patti, but, do not assume that it will add anything to your pay level through lane advancement or some other automatic formula. There are no papers to file or forms to fill out.

The coming system of educator effectiveness will have a large role in how people will be paid. As I have noted in the past, about half of that process will be based on student achievement data. Again, I am not an expert on this yet, and we are waiting to see how that all falls out. I blogged on one evaluation system that is now being incorporated by many schools in the state, and my e-mail is being inundated by various companies that have the greatest of all schemes for us to buy. I think we are just going to wait a bit to see what happens at the state with the new SIS and how all of that links together.

The bottom-line is that for next year you can lock in what you make now plus a raise that will most likely boil down to what we can do based on budgetary figures. That holds true for both professional staff and hourly wage rates for support staff.