Many Waukesha Teachers at top of pay scale

Waukesha teachers top out

One-third in district reach pinnacle of salary scale

By AMY HETZNER
ahetzner@journalsentinel.com

Posted: Sept. 21, 2007

Waukesha - Nearly a decade after the School District started shifting
its pay scale to emphasize education over experience, about one-third
of Waukesha teachers are at the top of the school system's salary
schedule.

More than 300 of 960 district teachers made $70,507 in 2006-'07, the
highest salary available to teachers and other certified staff without
picking up extra duties.

District officials are careful to point out that the compressed salary
schedule, in which teachers can earn large pay boosts for reaching
certain benchmarks in graduate and post-graduate education, doesn't
cost the district more than a traditional schedule that pays based on
a mixture of experience and education.

But because many of the teachers earning top pay also have seniority
privileges protecting them from layoffs, the top-loaded pay system
could cause problems as the district looks to more staff cuts to
balance its budgets.

When the district reduces staff to keep its costs within state-imposed
revenue caps, it often has to turn first to its lower-paid teachers,
who usually have less seniority.

And it has to lay off more of them than it would their higher-paid
counterparts to meet savings projections.

So the district spends the same amount of money, but on fewer teachers.

"The extent to which you have a higher and higher number of people at
the top of your salary schedule, it becomes more expensive," said Jack
Bothwell, executive director of human resources for the Waukesha
district.

No other Waukesha County school system had more than 10% of its
teaching staff earning more than $70,000 in the last school year,
according to data reported to the state Department of Public
Instruction.

In Milwaukee County, the Nicolet High School District had about 35% of
its teachers making more than $70,000 last school year.

About 31% of teachers in the Mequon-Thiensville School District earned
that district's top salary - $69,755 - in 2006-'07, state data shows.

But in most of those cases, the teachers had spent years in the
classroom on top of earning graduate degrees. The least-senior
teachers earning top pay in Nicolet and Mequon-Thiensville had spent
11 1/2 and 13 years in the profession, respectively.

In contrast, the Waukesha district had 14 teachers at the top of its
pay scale in 2006-'07 with five or fewer years of experience, state
reports say.

That is partly by design.

The Waukesha school system instituted its current pay system in the
1999-2000 school year, shifting money that had been sprinkled among
teachers at different educational and experience levels into specific
benchmarks available to teachers whenever they earned a certain number
of graduate credits.

Teachers content to work in their classrooms year to year without
pursuing coursework beyond their bachelor's degrees received only
nominal salary increases, while those who took approved classes could
reach the top of the schedule by earning a master's degree plus 30
post-graduate credits.

But the rapidity with which Waukesha teachers have been able to
advance in pay, as well as some of the accelerated master's programs
offered by colleges that have helped them, has been somewhat of a
surprise.

It also was targeted earlier this year by the Waukesha Taxpayers
League as helping to contribute to financial problems the district
faces. The league found one teacher hired in 2005-'06 at $34,795 who
was able to increase his salary by 78%, to $61,986, in one year.

"If you're increasing their salary by $25,000 over five years instead
of over the course of 17 years, yes, you're making a huge difference,
and you're having to cut programs because of it," said league
President Christine Lufter.

Janet Bashirian, president of the Education Association of Waukesha,
the teachers union, said it was unfair to blame teacher pay for the
district's budget woes, which caused a cut of the equivalent of 62
full-time teaching positions for the current school year to meet state
revenue restrictions.

Both she and Bothwell said graduate education can improve a teacher's
effectiveness in the classroom, and the reward system for continued
education has made the district attractive in recruiting and retaining
teachers.

But Bashirian said the union also questions the effect the salary
schedule might have in causing staff members to focus more on earning
credits than on the teaching responsibilities for which they were
hired.

"We are concerned with the speed with which people are earning credits
and the effectiveness they can have in their classrooms," she said.
"For the district to be competitive with the surrounding districts, we
need to put different incentives in different places on the salary
schedule. And sometimes that is not always at the top of the
schedule."

Waukesha's experience could be a lesson for other school districts,
such as Menomonee Falls, that are exploring whether to adopt similar
pay systems amid pressure to change how teachers are compensated.

Fiscal sustainability is a common downfall for alternative
compensation plans, said Jim Carlson, president of the Educator
Compensation Institute and a director for the Kettle Moraine UniServ
Council, which represents teachers in the Sheboygan area.

Incentive systems that pay teachers for increasing their skills
through education or reward other performance measures often cost more
than the old education-plus-experience model, he said. But that
doesn't mean school systems shouldn't try.

"The way we've paid teachers for the last 30 years may not be, likely
is not, the best way to pay teachers now," Carlson said. "The key is
to make sure we don't fix it with another problem."