House Speaker: No 10 percent pay raises for teachers
Published January 29, 2016
by Lynn Bonner, The Charlotte Observer, January 28, 2016.
House Speaker Tim Moore said he’d like to give teachers raises this year, but rejected a proposal for a 10 percent increase, calling it unrealistic.
Superintendent of Public Instruction June Atkinson suggested the 10 percent base pay increase Wednesday at a meeting of a House select committee. A 10 percent raise for all public school teachers would cost about $540 million.
Moore visited the same committee Thursday morning to say increases near the 2 percent the House proposed in its budget last year are more likely to be considered. And raises have to be negotiated with the state Senate, he added.
“We’ve got to be responsible with the numbers that we talk about with employee pay raises,” he said.
Later, Moore said no range has been discussed because no one knows how much the state will have to spend next year.
State workers did not get across-the-board raises this year. Teachers and other state employees received $750 bonuses. Teachers early in their careers got raises to bring their annual pay to $35,000, and the budget paid for step increases.
The House Select Committee on Education Strategy and Practices is talking about raises for teachers and how to structure them, and salaries for school principals and community college instructors.
Erlene Lyde, a West Charlotte High chemistry teacher and president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Association of Educators: “I appreciate June Atkinson’s proposal. I’m not surprised at the response by the speaker. Maybe there’s a middle ground and they can meet at 5?” she said, laughing. “I’ll be hopeful.”
Thursday’s meeting featured a panel of district superintendents who talked about how the legislature could make it easier for them to hire teachers at a time when it’s hard to find people to fill vacancies even in elementary schools.
Trouble filling math, science and special education teachers isn’t new, said Beverly Emory, superintendent at Winston-Salem/Forsyth schools. But for the first time, her district had 25 elementary school vacancies when the school year started.
Frank Till, Cumberland County superintendent, said his district started the school year with 50 vacancies. At affluent schools where a job opening would attract seven or eight applicants is now “lucky to get one for some positions,” he said.
Till was among the superintendents who said it should be easier for people who move to the state to get teaching jobs. Cumberland has a pool of military spouses willing to work, Till said, but the hurdles to a state license are too high.
In an interview, Rebecca Garland, deputy state superintendent, said each state has its own testing requirements for out-of-state teachers, making it hard to compare North Carolina with others.
But she knows superintendents are frustrated because elementary school teaching jobs are harder to fill.
“Elementary education has always been an area where we have not had a shortage,” she said. “Really, we have always had a nice pool of candidates for elementary school. The teacher shortage is extending to all areas of K-12.”
Superintendents said the state needs a long-range plan to attract and keep teachers.
Increasing pay should be part of the strategy, but creating ways for teachers to take on leadership roles and recognizing exceptional teachers are also important, they said.
“We need a long range plan,” said John Parker, interim superintendent for Roanoke Rapids schools. “Teaching has become less of a career and more of a short-term job.”
Sean Bulson, Wilson County superintendent, framed an across-the-board raise as raising the overall quality of classroom teachers by deepening the pool of job candidates.
“Despite the shortage, we’re working to push our least effective - and in some cases, least effective is the nice word - teachers out the door,” he said. “Because the pool isn’t so deep, we’re not going to push that mediocre teacher out that we might be able to do when we had some bench strength.”
The superintendents took turns criticizing the current teacher salary schedule, which tops out at 25-years experience, the school grading system that levels poor grades on schools even when teachers and students are making big strides, and the decision to stop funding NC Teaching Fellows, a scholarship and enrichment program for prospective teachers.
“We’ve disincentivized teaching pretty much on every level,” Bulson said. “All of the things that effect supply and demand in teaching are the things we’ve chipped away at over the last few years. So the answer has to be complex.”
