Lancaster County Teachers' Salary increases

Teachers' salaries rise here even as schools face deficits

The latest school contracts give teachers an average 3.6% pay increase. Other professions are receiving much smaller raises — if anything at all
Intelligencer Journal
Lancaster New Era

Updated Jan 05, 2011 23:53

By BRIAN WALLACE, Staff Writer



Like many Lancaster County school districts, Conestoga Valley is looking for ways to cut expenses as it prepares for a tight budget year in 2011-12.

During a recent meeting on ways to eliminate a projected $800,000 budget deficit, residents and administrators suggested cutting playground aides and reading-support teachers, scaling back on textbook purchases and eliminating the high school bowling, rifle and golf teams.

One resident even suggested CV cut its administrative salaries.

But there was no mention of the $636,000 worth of raises the district's 264 teachers will receive for the 2011-12 school year.

The CV teachers' four-year contract, which took effect last year, will boost salaries by a cumulative average of 20.4 percent and cost the district an additional $6.7 million over those four years. On average, teachers will get 3.78 percent raises every year through 2013-14.

Those numbers are not unique to CV.

The 11 teacher contracts approved in Lancaster County over the last 18 months will boost teacher salaries by an average of 3.6 percent a year.

The pay hikes were approved with little or no opposition from the public at a time when many workers in other professions were getting far lower increases — if they got any raise at all.

But school officials say the apparent disparity is not that simple.

Most of the new contracts include major concessions by teachers, mainly on health care costs, that will reduce the net impact to taxpayers by millions of dollars, they point out.

That CV pact, for instance, should save the district about $2.6 million in health care costs over four years.

School officials also say the hefty increases are necessary to attract and retain teachers in a competitive market.

And a teachers' union official says teacher salaries, even with the raises, are significantly lower than the salaries in other professions with similar education and training requirements.

But three of the new contracts don't include concessions, and the cost of the raises is significant, especially with districts facing huge increases in pension costs, stagnant or falling state aid and the tightest limits on their taxing ability in history.

The financial constraints have forced schools to lay off workers, cut programs, consider outsourcing custodial and other services and freeze administrators' pay.

Teacher salaries, meanwhile, will continue to go up.

Under the 11 contracts approved recently, starting salaries will increase by nearly $4,500, on average, over four to five years, from $41,207 to $45,686. Average salaries will rise by about $9,500, from $56,271 to $65,751, according to school district data.

Compounded, the raises will cost districts about $76 million, based on current staffing levels. That's offset by an estimated $23 million in savings from concessions, for a net projected cumulative cost of $53 million.

That averages out to about $4.8 million per district in added expenses over four or five years.

That cost is in addition to the $40 million in increased pension payments districts will face within four years. School officials also are bracing for another year of flat revenue from investments and property taxes and a possible decrease in state funding, which pumped an additional $15 million into county school district coffers in the past two years.

Faced with such economic hurdles, how can districts pay for such significant teacher salary increases?

School board members say they can't afford not to do so if they want to remain competitive with neighboring districts.

"How do we entice good teachers to come to our school district?" said Oliver Overlander III, Donegal school board president. "We don't have great facilities or athletic fields, so what do we have?

"If we're not competitive, we're not going to get the teachers," he said. "Salary is something you can show a new teacher."

Donegal approved a contract that boosts teacher pay by 3.5 percent a year over five years, for a cumulative increase of 18.8 percent.

The raises will add from $402,405 to $446,000 to the district's budget each year. Compounded over five years, the pay hikes will cost the district an additional $6.1 million.

But Donegal, like many other public school systems in the county, won major concessions that shift more of the cost of health care onto teachers.

Business manager Amy Swartz said it's difficult to quantify how much that will save the district, but she estimated the number at a little over $2 million. With the concessions, she said, the net increased cost of the contract is less than 1 percent a year.

Those benefits savings enabled the district to award teacher pay hikes that will help attract and retain teachers, Overlander said.

"The union membership seems to think the dollars are more important," he said. "The concessions on the back end — a newer teacher may not be as concerned with that."
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What union members think about the recent spate of new contracts isn't clear because they declined to comment for this story.

This newspaper sought comments from union representatives from Hempfield, Warwick, Pequea Valley, Solanco and Ephrata school districts and got only one response from a teacher, who deferred the questions to the Pennsylvania State Education Association.

All public school teachers in Lancaster County are represented by local unions affiliated with PSEA, which provides the locals with professional negotiators, if requested, during contract talks. Other locals negotiate contracts using their own teachers at the bargaining table.

Despite these variables — and the demographic differences between school districts — teachers have been able to negotiate very similar increases across the county and the state over the past 18 months.

Recent teacher raises here vary from a low of 2.99 percent in Warwick, where teachers did not agree to concessions, to 3.95 percent in Elizabethtown, which approved concessions expected to save the district $3.6 million.

The average increase in the county — 3.6 percent — mimics the average for other public school teachers in the region, which includes 57 districts in Lancaster, Dauphin, York and Chester counties.

According to the PSEA, the statewide average teacher raise for 2010 also was 3.6 percent, down from 4.0 percent in each of the previous two years.

But that's a small decline compared to the drop in the employment cost index, a national measure of the cost of wages and benefits reported quarterly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The ECI for the mid-Atlantic region has dropped steadily since the recession hit in late 2007, from 3.8 percent to 1.9 percent in the third quarter of 2010. While teacher contract negotiations were under way in some districts, the ECI dipped as low as 1.2 percent.

The recession has taken a toll on incomes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The median family income in Lancaster County grew by just 1.1 percent from 2008 to 2009, the agency reported, while per-capita personal income dropped by 2 percent.
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PSEA spokesman Wythe Keever said he doesn't think teachers are getting raises that are consistently higher than their peers in other occupations.

Comparing teacher pay hikes with the employment cost index isn't a valid comparison, he said, because the national data take into account job turnover, while the negotiated raises don't.

The ECI measures changes in income over time, including retirements and attrition, when younger, lower-paid workers tend to replace older, higher-paid workers, he said.

Teacher salaries in Lancaster County have actually fallen, Keever said, in inflation-adjusted dollars, by $4,403 over the past decade, according to an analysis by the state Department of Education.

He also cited a study by the Economic Policy Institute that found the nation's public school teachers earn, on average, about 14 percent less than other workers in occupations with similar educational and skill requirements. The study compared teachers with accountants, registered nurses and computer programmers, among other professions.

Statistics from the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry seem to bear that out, indicating that workers in those fields in Lancaster County make about $3,000 to $7,000 more per year than do teachers.

But the data also indicate average salaries for nurses and programmers declined in Lancaster County from 2007 to 2009, and average pay for accountants rose by only 3 percent.

Average teacher pay, on the other hand, rose by 5 percent to 7.65 percent over the same period — and that includes wages for both public and private school teachers, who tend to earn less than their peers at public schools. Starting teacher salaries rose by as much as 11.5 percent.

Keever conceded that unionized workers tend to see more stability in pay over time than nonunion workers. Their wages rise more slowly when the economy is booming than do salaries for other workers, he said, and they take less of a hit in poor economic times.

Sean Flaherty, an economics professor at Franklin & Marshall College, agreed with that analysis.

"Unions exist in order to get better wages and working conditions for their members," he said. "One would expect they'd do better than unorganized workers in most circumstances."

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Charles Trupe, a former member of the Eastern Lancaster County school board, said the PSEA has become too powerful.

Trupe, who served on the Elanco board from 2000 to 2009 and was involved in two teacher contract negotiations, said he has the utmost respect for teachers.

"The Elanco School District has been blessed with many outstanding teachers, and I would not want them to feel that they are not appreciated," he said.

"But the union, on the other hand, does not appreciate the taxpayers, and I'm convinced, does not appreciate their fellow teachers."

Years ago, Trupe said, teachers were underpaid but received comprehensive, low-cost benefits that helped compensate for their low salaries.

"Now teachers are fairly paid, with crazy benefits that we can't afford," he said. "Businesses have balanced their budgets by freezing salaries and raising health-care costs. Teachers are getting 3 percent to 4 percent raises and paying a third of what the private sector is for health care.

"If teachers had a salary freeze for two years, you wouldn't see programs getting cut and people getting laid off," said Trupe. "Union negotiators are so out of touch with reality."

That's a sentiment Tom Strickler, president of Columbia Borough school board, doesn't share.

When asked if the teachers' union is too powerful, Strickler said, in an e-mail, "We deal with people, not a union."

"When we negotiated this contract, the members of the board sitting at the table were talking to the people that teach and care about our kids," he said.

"In Columbia, we are dealing with a group of professionals that educate our children and, for the most part, are dedicated and care about every student that walks in their classroom every day."

Strickler said the district is more concerned about other cost increases beyond its control — such as soaring pension payments, inadequate special-education funding and cyberschool tuition — than it is about paying for a new teacher contract.

With concessions, the Columbia contract will cost the district from 2.1 percent to 2.3 percent more each year — not much more than the employment cost index, he pointed out.

Overlander, the Donegal school board president, said districts would continue to face economic challenges even if they froze teacher salaries.

"If we raised salaries by zero and banked the money and cut extracurricular (activities), we still might not have enough" to avoid major budget cuts, he said.

"In the coming years, we may be talking about laying off staff and reducing programs. We're in a predicament as a state and as a school district."

Like other employees, teachers are paid what the market will bear — and it's a competitive market, Keever said.

"When the compensation in one district lags behind others, teachers may have opportunities to go elsewhere," he said.

"When you talk about teacher compensation, it is an educational quality issue. Are we going to continue to attract the best teachers? Unless school boards take a hard look at compensation, they're fooling themselves," he said.

"No one wants to be the Pittsburgh Pirates of the teaching profession."

bwallace@lnpnews.com