Targeted Technical Assistance for Converging District Challenges - Salary Negotiations
The school district teacher salary negotiation process between district leadership and teachers’ associations can be challenging, particularly when districts are facing financial stress due to enrollment decline or reduced state revenues. Stakeholders have multiple goals including maintaining and improving relations, recruiting and retaining talent, improved knowledge and skills, managing workloads, and balancing a shrinking budget. Negotiations over the salary schedule can require multiple policy decisions, including how education credits are determined, placement of new hires, and additional pay for additional work. APA can help district and association negotiators by providing impartial information and evidence to support getting to agreement. This post highlights the support APA gave to one large district in the rocky mountain west.
In this case, both parties had a longstanding positive relationship with a shared goal of a competitive salary schedule. APA was brough into help when declining enrollment and changes to state funding increased the challenge of maintaining the current schedule. APA provided comparison information with other local districts to gauge their competitiveness and salary cost scenario forecast modeling to compare five-year budget impact of different salary schedules and related policy changes.
The district salary comparison focused on the local labor market, beginning with identifying the set of local school districts to use as comparison districts. For each district, APA examined:
Salary placement policies, to understand where new educators are placed on the schedule, rules around how teachers advance on the schedule over time, and additional compensation for specific characteristics such as hard to staff positions or schools;
The structure of each district’s schedule, enabling comparisons of how long teachers with specific education and years of experience can advance without acquiring additional education to move into another salary lane; and
Salary increases, in percentage of pay and dollar amounts, from step to step in each salary schedule, showing where in the schedule comparison districts may provide differential salary increases.
APA’s analysis allowed a direct comparison between educator salaries in the district’s current schedule, as well as the schedules under consideration during negotiations, to those in comparison districts -- one measure of the competitiveness of proposed salary schedules.
Five-Year Forecast Model
The five-year forecast model began with historical data on workforce behaviors including attrition, new hire placements, and movement throughout the salary schedule. This was used to forecast the future workforce: the model forecasts the number of educators and where they are within the salary schedule over a five-year period. The flexible model and allows negotiators to explore dozens of different scenarios including new salary levels, additional and reduced number of lanes and steps, early retirements, and increases in educational requirements to move up lanes in the salary schedule. The model can incorporate workload using student enrollment projections and different teacher-student ratio scenarios, providing a common measure of the “affordability” of different salary proposals.
With these supports from APA, the district and teacher association negotiators were able to agree on a revised salary system that provided new opportunities for educator salary growth, slowed the rate of overall salary cost increases, and increased the district’s focus on improving educator skills--leaving all parties satisfied.
APA Support
In addition to the work described above, APA has supported other districts with various compensation analyses, such as 10-year earnings comparisons across districts, evaluation of teacher advancement patterns across the schedule, and compensation comparisons for specific groups, such as career and technical education teachers.
For districts facing salary negotiations and changing finances, APA has the tools, information, and experience to support the development of salary systems to meet multiple goals. Get in touch here — and in the meantime, follow us on LinkedIn for more.
Robert Reichardt, PhD, is a Senior Associate at APA with over 25 years of experience in education policy and program improvement. He blends deep expertise in evaluation and policy analysis with a commitment to equity and public service through his roles in local government and education leadership.
Dr. Reichardt can be reached via email at rer@apaconsulting.net.