Charities try to help Oklahoma teachers survive pay collapse

SEAN MURPHY

OKLAHOMA CITY — Tiona Bowman was overcome with emotion when the walls were erected last spring on her first-ever new home, a three-bedroom, twobath house in Tulsa built through Habitat for Humanity.

Bowman was flanked by her daughter and members of her family, work colleagues and a handful of local reporters who had come to document the event.

Unlike most of those who qualify for a subsidized Habitat home, though, Bowman, 28, wasn’t a fastfood worker or other low-income service employee, but rather a teacher in Tulsa Public Schools with a master’s degree and three years of experience.

“Obviously I was grateful and excited,” said Bowman, who teaches middle-school English and whose $34,000 salary made her eligible for a no-interest loan on one of the program’s houses. “But on the other hand, I was like: I went to school for all these years, I have these degrees, and I qualify for a program like this?”

Charity for teachers isn’t that unusual in Oklahoma these days as more of them approach the ranks of the working poor, becoming the most visible victims of the state’s seemingly endless budget problems.

With state revenues depleted by deep tax cuts and lower energy prices, Oklahoma’s teacher salaries are now the second lowest in the U.S., even though the state’s gross domestic product ranks 29th.

Teachers haven’t had a pay hike in a decade, and 10-year veteran teachers who are single now make little enough that their own children qualify for reduced-price school lunches.

As schools reopen for the fall term, hundreds have left their jobs while communities and local charities are coming forward with gifts and incentives to try to keep others from departing.

“Habitat for Humanity was not intended to be constructing homes for working teachers,” said Cameron Walker,thecharity’sTulsadirector,but theirincomeisapproaching“typically hourlyjobs,peoplewhocouldn’twalk into a bank and get a mortgage.”

While never high, teacher pay was squeezed when the GOP-led Legislature slashed taxes on both individual income and oil and natural gas production in 2014, just as oil prices began dropping sharply from a boom-era level of more than $100 a barrel. Oil prices now are hovering below $50.

Since then, while publicly making higher teacher salaries their top priority, lawmakers have not overcome strong conservative aversion to resetting the tax rates, especially on the powerful oil and gas industry. Over the past three years, state funding for public schools has declined by more than $48 million, even as student enrolment increased by nearly 8,000.

While school budgets overall have suffered, teacher pay has taken the greatest hit because it alone is entirely funded by state appropriations rather than a mix of state, local and county revenue. Oklahoma’s average teacher salary of $45,276 trails only Mississippi, while the starting minimum salary is $31,600.

Even affluent districts with new buildings and huge football stadiums are now hemorrhaging qualified teachers to other states or professions. Overall, there are about 1,500 fewer teachers in Oklahoma than in 2010, according to data from the Oklahoma State School Boards Association.

In some cities, a sense of emergency is growing. In Tulsa, a downtown church has begun providing free meals periodically to teachers at a nearby school.

Habitat for Humanity has built houses for two Tulsa teachers and has received applications from about a dozen more. A Tulsa-based charity, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, is offering low-interest home loans, or, for Teach for America recruits, subsidized rent on newly refurbished downtown apartments.

In smaller communities such as Enid in rural northwest Oklahoma, the chamber of commerce is soliciting fitness centres and restaurants to offer discounts and freebies. And scores of organizations are soliciting donations to buy classroom supplies.