Districts in a quandary over raises for teachers

Arkansas’ decision to raise the teacher salary floor received universal fanfare last year, but that decision now has some public school districts in precarious positions.

What should be cut to free money to pay for the raises: athletics, pre-kindergarten, health centers, staff?

Gov. Asa Hutchinson established a special fund last year meant to help school districts pay the mandated raises over the next four years, but district leaders from around the state said that money won’t be adequate, especially in the coming years.

In Magazine, the cuts have already started. Magazine School District Superintendent Beth Shumate

said in an interview last week that the district had already eliminated three positions through attrition — a school nurse, a certified teacher and a cafeteria worker.

Staring down the next three years, Shumate said more budget cuts are imminent without a new funding influx. For now, the district is focusing on cutting costs such as utilities and even the number of trash cans in each classroom.

Eventually, Shumate noted there won’t be anything else to cut.

“There is such a concern that school districts have calculated how long they can survive after four years,” she said.

Hutchinson and state lawmakers made raising the minimum teacher salary in Arkansas a priority during last year’s legislative session, saying it would help retain and attract quality educators. They also established a $60 million fund that would be distributed to affected school districts over four years to help them comply with the new minimum teacher salary schedule.

Shumate and other concerned administrators thanked the governor and General Assembly for considering teachers and for providing funding to help with the new costs. They paired the gratitude with a warning that something must be done before that funding disappears in 2023.

“We are in favor of teacher raises,” said Wayne Fawcett, superintendent of the Paris School District. “Our teachers are underpaid statewide. We’re absolutely in favor; we just have to figure out ways to fund these things going forward.”

Exacerbating the salary-finance quandary for districts, the mandatory teacher pay increases come at the same time Arkansas’ minimum wage is being increased and other new state mandates demand additional district funds.

Asked whether the $60 million fund would be sufficient, Kimberly Mundell, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said the Educator Compensation Reform program was designed to provide a “bridge” to help districts meet the new salary requirements.

Mundell said another critical component of salary funding falls on the House and Senate Education Committees’ biennial review of Arkansas’ public school funding formula. She noted that the formula’s line item for teacher salaries was increased by 2% this year and will increase 2% again next school year. (The formula outlines how much districts are to get for various parts of school operations.)

“However, those two components alone won’t get Arkansas where it needs to be,” she said in an email. “Local school boards and administrators must make teacher salaries a priority and adjust their local salary schedules to reflect that priority.”

Act 170 of 2019 raised the minimum teacher salary from zero years of experience to 15 years. The law raises the bottom starting salary for a firstyear teacher with a bachelor’s degree from $31,800 in 2019 to $36,000 in 2023.

The law affected 168 public school districts that were paying starting teachers less than $36,000; the remaining 67 districts had already implemented salary schedules in which new teachers would have starting pay greater than the minimum.

Act 877 of 2019 created the $60 million Educator Compensation Reform program.

A district’s allotment from the fund was determined by a calculation that included subtracting a district’s minimum teacher salary for the prior year from the minimum salary required for the current year and multiplying that by the district’s number of licensed teachers in 2017-18, not counting those paid with federal funds. The formula includes an additional provision to take into account federal insurance contributions and the teacher retirement matching rate.

The Little Rock School District stands to receive the most from the program: $2.6 million.

School administrators in interviews this week identified two main flaws in the $60 million program. First, the money doesn’t compound year over year, meaning a district gets money to cover only the increased salary costs from the prior school year.

This causes a problem for districts like Hamburg, which must increase its starting teachers’ salaries by $1,000 for the next three years. However, the district in 202122 won’t continue to receive reimbursement for the $1,000 raises it gave in 2020-21.

“Districts are going to be able to make it this year and next,” said Richard Abernathy, executive director of the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators. “But that third and fourth year, it’s really going to hurt because that money isn’t compounding.”

Secondly, administrators also said it’s a problem that the fund’s salary schedule extends for only 15 years of experience. However, many districts have implemented salary schedules that go beyond 15 years; in many cases, the schedules cover more than two decades.

That means that districts that recognize teachers’ service beyond 15 years must absorb the costs of any raises it give to them.

“We make that local decision in order to keep and retain teachers,” Fawcett said. “We couldn’t stop our salary schedule at 15 years. We’ve got to get those teachers here and keep them to give them incentive to stay here for a long period of time.”

Rep. Bruce Cozart, R-Hot Springs, acknowledged school administrators’ concerns and said he plans to work to address them. He believes there should be a continuation of a special fund or a new categorical fund put into the school funding formula to provide relief to the schools that are having to raise their teachers’ salaries to comply with the new state minimums.

“It’s going to be fight going forward,” Cozart said. “We’re getting some negatives from the Department of Education that there’s not a need for that; that they can make this work. I’m sure some schools can make this work, large schools. It’s the smaller schools that are struggling.”

Abernathy said the root problem is the design of the matrix that is used to fund Arkansas’ public schools, which was developed in the mid-2000s after a landmark court decision that declared Arkansas’ education funding system inequitable and unconstitutional.

The formula funds schools based on student enrollment numbers, but sometimes that doesn’t match with state standards. In Magazine, for example, the district has fewer than 40 kindergarten students, meaning it must hire only two kindergarten teachers to comply with the state requirement of one kindergarten teacher per every 20 kindergartners.

However, Shumate said that kindergarten enrollment is expected to slightly exceed 40 children next year, meaning she must hire a third kindergarten teacher. The district will receive funding for the handful of additional students, but it won’t receive funding for 20 additional students, which is needed to fully fund a third kindergarten class.

Abernathy said a possible solution would be to create a supplemental fund for districts that don’t have their teachers’ salaries fully covered by foundation funding.

“The matrix has been good; it’s been fairly effective,” he said. “But we’ve seen the flaws in it now.”