RE1J school administrators propose revised salaries

Hoping to improve transparency without additional cost

With contract negotiations between the Gunnison Watershed School District administration and the Teachers Association starting Wednesday, April 30, superintendent Doug Tredway and business manager Stephanie Juneau unveiled a proposal at a work session on Monday, April 21 to restructure the salary structure for district employees.

The new salary “schedule” sets out to make employee pay more consistent across the district’s buildings and fix holes that make it hard for prospective employees and the public to know how much people with different levels of education and experience are making.
In a discussion with nearly 20 teachers from around the district, Tredway and Juneau promised the proposal wouldn’t hurt any teacher or other employees financially and also wouldn’t cost the district any more money than it now spends on salaries.
The district has three categories of employees: administration, teachers and classified employees who cook, clean, drive buses and do a host of other necessary jobs around the district. Most employees get a 2.5 percent pay raise every year, according to the schedule, and can earn more money with experience and by gaining advanced degrees or other kinds of professional development.
Annual raises are not guaranteed, however, and employees advance to the next “step” only at the behest of the administration by showing satisfactory performance, Tredway said.
Administrators are the highest paid members of the school district staff and can earn a six-figure salary over time. But after the cost of health insurance started to rise several years ago, the district created a separate administration salary schedule for new hires that maintained the level of pay but did not include a payout for full family health benefits. Now the health plans for administrators cover only the individual.
Currently, the only administrator to be grandfathered in under the old salary schedule does not take advantage of the full-family health benefits, so Tredway and Juneau are recommending the administrators all be grouped into one salary schedule. That would save about $16,000 annually to help pay for adjustments elsewhere in the district’s salaries.
At the same time, the proposal would bring some equity among administrators who are currently paid different salaries for doing essentially the same job. Based on the current daily rate, an assistant principal could make more than a principal.
Now with the changes, an elementary school principal will get paid the same as a high school principal. Some quirks have been ironed out and the arcane system of salary caps and annuities that befell administrators with more than 10 years of experience would be gone. Under the proposal, administrators would simply get a 2.5 percent pay raise every year of their tenure.
“We’ve done a little bit of work over the years, but it’s still not very transparent and it’s not lined up very well,” Juneau said. “It’s just awkward.”
The proposal would also increase transparency in the teacher’s salary schedule, which can range from just over $33,000 for a new hire with no experience to around $70,000 for a 20-year veteran with a Ph.D., by applying a standard formula instead of the current formula. The current formula leaves 49 of the district’s 140 teachers in an area of the schedule that has no information about advancement and appears as a literal hole in the schedule that makes it hard to know what some teachers are making.
“I have no idea where the hole came from, why it’s there or what purpose it might serve. But we have 49 people in the hole. On top of that, our HR person has to keep track of what increment [goes with what employee] for each of those 49 employees. It’s all very manual,” Juneau said. “The other thing with this schedule is it’s based upon a dollar amount increase … that’s not consistent across the schedule. It’s all very peculiar.”
By comparing the district’s salary schedule to those from neighboring districts, Juneau could see that the hole in the salary schedule was unique to the district and decided to propose a revised salary formula for teachers that is clearer for members of the public wanting to know teacher salaries and for prospective teachers.
The proposal also addresses classified employee salaries, which includes the bus drivers the district has had so much trouble attracting and retaining.
“The biggest problem we have with our classified is we underpay our bus drivers for the Gunnison market value here in the valley or compared to other school districts and nearby communities. And we have a really hard time filling driver routes and we have a hard time getting substitute bus drivers. We feel part of the reason is we are paying them a starting wage of $11.28 and you can only come in at a step five, so even if you’ve been driving a bus for 20 years with Mountain Express, we can only pay that bus driver $12.25. That’s under market value,” Juneau said.
Last year, the district had trouble filling a route in Crested Butte South that would take kids to the Crested Butte Community School. When Tredway read through the rates several neighboring districts or companies pay their bus drivers, each was $1.50 to $2 or more higher than the district’s current pay for drivers.
To bring the drivers’ wages closer to market value to hopefully retain good drivers and attract more drivers to fill permanent positions with the district, Juneau suggested adding another row to the classified employee salary schedule just for bus drivers.
“They’re not managing people, but they are managing 50 students and their behavior while trying to drive a bus and be safe. And they have to have a license. For those reasons we feel it’s appropriate for them to be in their own schedule,” Juneau said.
That would allow a new bus driver to make between $12.46 and $13.57 an hour, depending on experience. “It’s still not on par with Mountain Express … but it’s better and it fits within what we have available,” Juneau said.
In restructuring the salary schedule with an eye toward a possible initiative to pass a mill levy override in November, the administration didn’t want the revised salaries to cost the district more than they do now.
“This is a pretty difficult issue. We actually cut a route out and we still don’t have enough drivers,” Tredway said. “That reduction in the number of routes pays for the shift in salaries.”
The proposed revisions to the salary schedule will be discussed as part of the contract negotiations starting April 30 between five members of the administration and five teacher representatives. Those negotiations have never taken longer than the three scheduled days. The board will have an opportunity to sign the contract in May.