Board adds $300K to payroll

Teachers receive 4 percent raises; five principals gets pay boosts between 12 percent and 41 percent

With a quiet 5-2 vote Oct. 24, the Pottstown School Board added more than $300,000 to the district’s payroll, Digital First Media has learned.

Before voting, school board member Kurt Heidel was at least willing to inform the public that most of the raises work out to about 4 percent.

He expanded upon the information available to the public Oct. 25 in a post on The Mercury’s Facebook page where he wrote, in part: “The raise is an across the board 4 percent increase, for one year, retroactive to July 1 2016. The reason the raises were not given until now was due to first completing the negotiations with the Federation of Teachers. All of the raises are paid for as part of the district’s 2016-17 budget. This is the same budget that raised taxes 0% for the districts taxpayers.”

However, what no one said — nor is it spelled out in any document the district was willing to provide — is that the vote also included 20 percent raises for four of the districts seven principals and a 12 percent raise for another.

Taken together, raises for all the principals alone add $95,744 to the district’s payroll — enough to pay for another principal.

The largest of those raises was provided to Middle School Principal David Todd, whose salary jumped by 41 percent, to $102,639 — an increase of more than $30,000.

Barth and Lincoln Elementary principals Ryan Oxenford and Calista Boyer both received 20 percent raises — $16,288 — and Franklin Elementary Principal Kevin Downes received a boost of $16,772.

High School Principal Danielle McCoy received a 12 percent salary hike, an $11,646 increase bringing her salary of $105,759.

These increases did not occur in a vacuum.

Business Manager Linda Adams confirmed Oct. 26 the elementary principals have been moved

recently from 10-month-per-year to 12-month-peryear employees.

Adams, who is also the school district’s Rightto-Know officer, said she would respond to a question about Mr. Todd’s raise on Oct. 27.

Todd and McCoy were both promoted to building principals in 2015.

Perhaps more significantly, Adams also did not respond to a request Oct. 26 for the dollar impact of the raises on the payroll.

John Armato, the director of community relations for the district, said Oct. 26 there was no one in the administration building that day capable of providing before deadline the amount the raises will add to the payroll — two days after the vote to approve the raises occurred.

Further, a request to Adams Oct. 25 to provide any kind of spread-sheet showing the impact of the raises from last year to this year elicited no response.

Instead, Adams referred The Mercury to an agenda from last June archived — but not currently readable — on the district web site, when raises were also provided to the classified, exempt and Act 93 employees.

Amid several hours of emails back and forth, Adams finally provided directly the attachment listing last year’s raises.

However, unlike this year, which listed all three classes of employees and their new salaries separately, the 2015 document mixed all three groups of employees together, making it that much more difficult to determine the overall financial impact.

Further complicating that effort is that fact that the classified employees are paid by the hour, and while their hourly rate presumably rose by 4 percent, it is impossible to determine their earnings without knowing how many hours they worked in both years.

Not including the classified employees, the new salaries of the administrative and “exempt” non-union staff now add up to nearly $3.3 million.

Despite the administration’s inability to provide a financial impact for the raises in the three days since the vote, they were provided to the school board — sort of.

The Mercury has learned that the school board was informed at two different times in recent months that the amount the raises will add to the payroll is either $327,000 or $400,000.

In August, the school board approved a threeyear contract with the Federation of Pottstown Teachers that included no increase in rate of pay, but re-arranged the structure of the pay scale ensuring many teachers with less seniority would receive more step increases in their pay.

The financial impact of that contract was revealed at the same school board meeting it was adopted by Solicitor Stephen Kalis — $454,223 to the payroll in the first year of the contract, which began Sept. 1; another $425,688 to the payroll in the second year and by the third year, the cumulative financial impact of the salary re-arrangement will be close to $1.3 million.

That means, depending on which non-union figure is correct, the school board has voted to add between $781,223 and $854,223 to the payroll in the current school year.

Only two board members voted against the raises Oct. 24 — Ron Williams and Thomas Hylton.

In explaining his vote, Hylton noted that from July 2008 to Oct. 15, salaries for the teachers has risen by 24 percent; by 19 percent for the Act 93 staff and by 15 percent for the support staff — all while inflation over the same period rose by only eight percent.