It's Friday morning September 22, 2023. We just got off the phone with the Evergreen School District HR; Evergreen Teachers Association Union office; Camas School District HR and Battle Ground HR. We contacted Evergreen and Camas to get copies of the newly approved teachers contracts. Neither contract is published and there is no target date for publication. Both districts said that once the teachers have approved the contract the district must then go through a review process to correct any wording and formatting. The proposed final document then goes back to the Union with any revisions and then back to the district, rinse and repeat until it's approved by both parties. In the case of … [Read more...]
Battle Ground School District – compensation history 2016-2022
As the Battle Ground Teachers decide whether to strike or not it's appropriate to look at the changes to their compensation since McCleary. Please note the salary + benefits as well as the compensation growth vs inflation. Are your earnings growing faster than inflation? Do you earn more than the median in Clark County? Where will the school board get the nearly 17% increase? … [Read more...]
2023 Levy’s in Washington State
Are you interested in learning more about levy's across Washington State in 2023? Give this link a click: https://www.levyno.com/ Here are just a few of the snapshots you will be able to study: … [Read more...]
WA State School Superintendents and Asst. Superintendents total compensation report
Are Superintendents and Asst. Superintendents paid too much? Does the size of the school district make any difference? What’s the cost per student for the Superintendent piece of the pie? In today's article we share information from Jeff Heckathorn’s website. He’s assembled some data that you may find interesting. Specifically he looked into the costs from the leadership side of school districts. Let’s look at Superintendents: Total Compensation For Superintendents Vs Enrollments | The School Data Project : In 2019/2020 the highest paid District Superintendent was...Vancouver SD in Vancouver, WA. Slightly over 20,000 students. Certainly one of the larger districts in the state but far … [Read more...]
Are public school teachers underpaid?
The question posed in the title is a bit loaded. First, teachers will say yes while others will say no. We pulled a couple of charts and information from an article from a May 2018 article published in Intellectual Takeout. The latest data is for 2017. In a report at National Center for Education Statistics we find the following chart: Those figures generally exclude benefits, such as health insurance, paid leave, and pensions. According to the Department of Labor, benefits comprise an average of 33% of compensation for public school teachers. This excludes unfunded pension liabilities and certain post-employment benefits like health insurance, which are not measured by the … [Read more...]
Washington State School Funding data for Ridgefield School District “More money does what?”
There is a LOT of buzz about funding K-12 education in Washington State the last couple of years. We’ve seen the State raise property taxes to better fund schools…with over 50% of the entire state budget going to education. We’ve seen limits placed on local levy’s with a requirement to ONLY use the funds for “enrichment” programs. We’ve seen the legislature debate increasing the $1.50 levy limit to $2.50 because most of the extra funds from tax increases went to teachers and districts are now running deficits and need to lay teachers off. We now see special “capital levies” to fund technology. We see capital bonds to fund new schools and renovations/repairs. So what has all that money done … [Read more...]
Washington State School Funding data for Evergreen School District “More money does what?”
There is a LOT of buzz about funding K-12 education in Washington State the last couple of years. We've seen the State raise property taxes to better fund schools...with over 50% of the entire state budget going to education. We've seen limits placed on local levy's with a requirement to ONLY use the funds for "enrichment" programs. We've seen the legislature debate increasing the $1.50 levy limit to $2.50 because most of the extra funds from tax increases went to teachers and districts are now running deficits and need to lay teachers off. We now see special "capital levies" to fund technology. We see capital bonds to fund new schools and renovations/repairs. So what has all that money done … [Read more...]
Teacher Pay
For those of you who know him Chad Magendaz (chad@magendaz.com) was a Washington State Representative and has spent a fair amount of time dealing with education. He recently shared some information about teacher pay and wrote the following article and has allowed us to share it. What say you? So much of the McCleary discussion these days has been driven by the big stakeholder groups, the largest being the state teachers’ union. In light of the barrage of misinformation they’ll be spreading to support their interests, it’s important to arm yourself with some critical talking points on the McCleary proposals you’ll be seeing throughout this session. According to OSPI's final report … [Read more...]