In reversal, Glendale charter will pay bonuses

The board for Heritage Elementary, a Glendale charter school, voted to reverse itself at a brief special meeting and will award merit pay bonuses to teachers who earned them during the past school year but were not returning.

The board for Heritage Elementary, a Glendale charter school, reversed itself at a brief special meeting Tuesday and voted to award merit pay bonuses to teachers who earned them during the past school year but were not returning.

“It really shows that they knew what they were doing was not right,” said Sarah Jennings, one of the 20 teachers who demanded the bonuses. “We are the first group of people to stand up to them … All it takes is a group of people being organized and stepping out a little bit and make change.”

At issue was Proposition 301 money, voter-approved education funds that include performance pay for teachers across Arizona. The teachers said they received their first installment of Prop 301 money in December, but were still owed between $1,500 and $1,800 each for work already performed.

The school serves about 900 students in kindergarten through eighth grade.

The four-member board, which like other charter school governing boards is not elected by the public, had voted in late June to not give the teachers their remaining merit pay because they were not coming back to Heritage for the upcoming school year. Many took teaching jobs at other schools.

Teachers appealed the decision to Principal Justin Dye and Superintendent Jackie Trujillo, but were rebuffed, according to interviews and emails the teachers provided to The Arizona Republic. The two administrators had told the teachers that only those re-