Specifics of K-12 raises becoming more clear
Pay boosts for teachers, other staff vary widely
Nearly a month after state lawmakers approved $306 million intended as the first down payment on Gov. Doug Ducey’s promise to boost every Arizona teacher’s pay 20 percent by 2020, some trends are becoming clear.
School districts are not only delivering on 10 percent teacher raises. Most are also giving raises to other employees, such as bus drivers, janitors, nurses, administrators and educators who were not calculated into the state money.
School districts that had previously committed to giving their teachers raises — before the teacher-led #RedForEd movement changed the course of state budget discussions — are deciding to dole out even more money.
The pay stubs for teachers in these districts, such as the Washington Elementary and Tempe Union school districts, will look drastically different next school year. Some teachers will see pay bumps as high as nearly 20
percent.
That’s far more than Ducey’s threeyear plan, which calls for 10 percent pay hikes in the coming school year and 5 percent the following two years.
Chuck Essigs, lobbyist for the Arizona Association of School Business Officials and a longtime school-finance official, said the pay-raise plans that have been announced by districts so far “would be the most significant increases that teachers have received in any year that I can remember.”
“And I’m pretty old; I can remember a few years back,” Essigs said.
But Essigs and other school officials and public-education advocates note the raises and new state education funding do not entirely restore the $1 billion in cuts to education funding following the recession.
Leaders of Arizona Educators United, the teacher-led group that coordinated the statewide, six-day #RedForEd teacher walkout that ended May 4, claimed a partial victory with the budget, but most of the funding demands they announced in late March have not been met.
Many school boards are still internally debating their budgets and have not yet publicly unveiled any proposals.
School boards have the final say over how the new money will be spent, and are expected to make their decisions by the end of June.
Here is what we know so far about how schools plan to spend the new funding.
1. Teacher raises widely vary
Yes, nearly all of the 46 Arizona school districts tallied by The Arizona
Republic that have announced proposals call for giving teachers average raises that are upward of 10 percent next school year.
However, the actual dollar amounts for teachers, as well as the rate of the pay bumps teachers should expect, vary widely across the state.
For instance, several districts have raised their starting salaries and plan to give bigger increases to more-experienced educators who went without pay raises for several years.
In Washington Elementary School District, for example, a 25-year teacher with a master’s degree will make $60,822 in the 2018-19 school year after making $50,412 this year, according to Justin Wing, the district’s human resources director. The raise for this level of teacher amounts to just over 20 percent.
Tempe Union High School District plans to give teachers a $7,549 pay increase in total next school year. That would amount to raises ranging from 10 to 19.6 percent, depending on the teacher’s salary.
Some districts, such as Yuma Elementary School District, plan to give teachers raises ranging between 10 and 11 percent, depending on teachers’ experience. Newer teachers will receive less.
A fourth-year Yuma Elementary teacher posted his new salary of $34,700, including the 10 percent pay increase, on the closed Arizona Educators United Facebook group.
The teacher said in his post that while the district did what it could to raise his pay, his new salary shows that more needs to be done.
Daniel Scarpinato, spokesman for Ducey, said the governor is “very pleased” with how school districts are planning to spend the additional funding.
“Schools have really followed through on getting these dollars to teachers and support staff, (and they’ve) done it very quickly,” Scarpinato said. “We think this will go a long way toward attracting and retaining highly qualified teachers.”
Noah Karvelis, an Arizona Educators United organizer, called districts’ spending plans “encouraging,” though he added, “Regardless of the district, our teachers are still paid too little and our students still don’t have the funding that they need.”
2. Support staff not forgotten
Nearly every school-district proposal unveiled so far includes pay bumps for school employees beyond teachers.
The proposed increases for these employees — including school administrators and classified employees who make less than teachers — are between 1 and 10 percent.
Maricopa Unified School District in Pinal County, for example, plans to give its bus drivers and mechanics 10 percent pay increases, to address a shortage of bus drivers, and give 5 percent increases to the rest of its classified staff. Teachers are slated to receive 10 percent raises.
Classified and administrative staff in Phoenix’s Madison Elementary School District are expected to receive 9 percent increases.
None of the school budget plans announced so far call for boosting support-staff pay at a higher rate than what is being proposed for teachers.
Competitive pay for support staff, such as paraprofessionals, cafeteria workers, aides and bus drivers, was one of the Arizona Educators United group’s five demands.
After Ducey announced his #20by2020 proposal April 12, #RedForEd organizers criticized the plan in part because it did not earmark money for these school employees who also participated in the walkout.
Beyond teacher pay, much of the messaging around the teacher walkout was about shining a spotlight on low wages for support staffers and overall poor working and learning conditions in schools.
Tom Oviatt, president of the Phoenix Union Classified Employees Association, said the fact that schools are including support employees in their raise plans is “probably one of the best things that could happen” and validated their support for a walkout.
3. Other money funding raises
Schools’ pay plans appear to be crafted in response to #RedForEd demands to include support staff, pressure from the governor and Legislature to focus on teachers, and a persisting desire from parents and the public to see tangible progress in teacher pay.
But the main issue local school boards have grappled with in deciding how to spend the new money has been a recurring one for the past decade: There is not enough money to go around to address everything schools say they need.
The state budget included about $95 million in capital funding, known as District Additional Assistance, one of the pots of school funding that endured the steepest cuts after the recession.
Schools are free to spend the capital funding as they want, although it is intended to pay for textbooks, technology, school buses and maintenance repairs.
Districts are still receiving about 70 percent less in capital funding from the state than in 2008, according to Essigs. A lawsuit over the state’s underfunding of school capital needs is pending.
Several school districts are funneling some or all of that new capital funding toward teacher and staff pay raises.
Tucson Unified School District plans to put all of its new state money, including $3.8 million in capital funding, toward staff pay raises. The district had previously planned to use that money to address a backlog of school repairs and hire more counselors and social workers.
“It’s very hard to make this decision, looking at what we have to give up,” Kristel Ann Foster, a Tucson school board member, said at a May 22 meeting.
Even districts with the highest planned teacher raises used capital money to fund their plans.
Avondale’s Agua Fria Union High School District, which is proposing its teachers get approximate 15 percent raises, plans to steer its capital funding toward pay increases for classified employees.
The district indirectly will receive help for its plan from a capital bond and override approved by local voters. Those local property-tax funding measures are intended to go toward specific causes, such as school construction and teacher pay, but essentially free up money elsewhere for districts that have them.
Dennis Runyan, superintendent of Agua Fria, said the bond, override and additional funding from the state Legislature gave the district the “unique opportunity to provide a 15 percent raise for teaching staff and 5 percent for support and admin staff.”
Runyan added: “When you take the 10,000-foot view, the state is still trying to recover, and I think that’s important for the public to understand.”
4. 10 percent unlikely for some
A prior analysis, based on figures provided to the Arizona auditor general by school districts, showed that 59 school districts would not receive enough funding to give all teachers a 20 percent pay raise by 2020, as the governor has repeatedly promised.
That projection is starting to hold true, mainly because of how the state calculated the new funding intended for teacher pay.
The state’s calculations are based on Arizona’s average teacher pay of about $48,000, according to the state auditor general, meaning that some districts with higher-than-average teacher pay will receive less funding than needed to give all teachers 20 percent raises.
But this also means some districts whose teacher pay is lower than the state average would get enough money to go beyond the 20 percent raises.
Phoenix Union High School District, one of Arizona’s highest-paying districts for teachers, with an average salary of $62,782, is proposing to give all certified employees — including counselors and librarians — a $4,600 increase that would equate to an average 8 percent increase in 2018-19.
Phoenix Union is among the few districts so far that will not meet the 10 percent teacher pay raise benchmark.
In a May 21 letter to staff explaining why increases would be lower than 10 percent, Phoenix Union Superintendent Chad Gestson wrote that the district “received much less than 10%” from the state.
The state’s allocations, Gestson wrote, were enough for only 6.7 percent raises and limited the number of teachers eligible for the award.
The district’s 8 percent increase proposal also includes across-the-board raises for classified and administrative employees funded through the state’s new money for raises, including capital funding.
“Even if all new funds were distributed equally and permanently, our percentage would fall significantly short of the 10 percent,” Gestson wrote, adding that Phoenix Union would remain one of the top-paying districts.
5. Long-term impact unclear
Experts say it’s too early to determine how this year’s teacher raises will impact Arizona’s years-long shortage of qualified teachers.
School officials and education advocates have long pointed to the state’s low pay, which consistently has ranked among the worst in the nation, as a main cause of Arizona’s critical shortage.
The problem has snowballed in recent years as fewer people enter teacher prep programs and apply for teaching positions, and as waves of teachers have quit the profession or retired.
As recently as December, the state had 2,000 vacant teaching posts, according to a survey by the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association. As a result, many schools this year turned to hiring teachers on emergency certificates that don’t require any formal teacher training.
Wing, the Washington Elementary School District human resources director, said the most immediate impact the raises likely will have is in keeping qualified teachers as opposed to attracting new ones.
The Washington district had already committed to giving teachers 6.5 percent raises before Ducey and the Legislature introduced the additional school funding. With the new money, teachers will average 15.5 percent raises in 201819.
The district was able to do this by eliminating some certified specialist positions and replacing them with classified positions that cost less money, a “difficult” decision Wing likened to “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
After the district announced its initial 6.5 percent raise, Wing noted more teachers signed contracts to stay in the district than previous years. The district still has 24 openings, but that’s better than the 60 vacancies it had this time last year.
“If things are followed through, it would definitely assist as a solution,” Wing said of Ducey’s #20by2020 promise.
“(But) it’s like the NFL draft,” Wing said. “You really don’t know what you’ve got until another couple years. You can’t really grade something until a few years later when you see how it works.”