The competition to increase pay and other benefits for schoolteachers in the Baton Rouge region and across Louisiana continues to get ever more fierce.
The latest is an announcement from Colorado-based Third Future Schools. As part of its takeover of Prescott Middle School this fall, the charter school group says it will be paying its starting teachers an estimated $20,000 more a year than the going local rate and that its average teacher pay should clock in at around $80,000 a year.
Many charter schools in Baton Rouge benchmark their pay scale against the biggest district in the region, the East Baton Rouge Parish school system, where a starting teacher currently makes $47,800 a year and the average teacher makes about $55,000 a year. If Third Futures adopts the same benchmark, it would pay about $68,000 a year to its starting teachers at Prescott and its average teachers would make about $25,000 a year more on average than those in Baton Rouge public schools.
Third Futures has already begun recruiting. In an ad for an eighth-grade English teacher, Third Future says it is likely to pay whomever it hires between $86,000 and $91,000 a year.
Not all teachers at Third Futures, however, are making that kind of money.
In a recent presentation to Louisiana leaders, the charter group showed a range of starting teacher salaries at its other schools. Those ranged from as low as $50,000 a year for a learning coach to as much as $89,400 a year for a core classroom teacher. The average for core teachers is just shy of $74,000 a year.
Every school district in the Baton Rouge region has been trying to up its teacher compensation game.
For instance, Pointe Coupee Parish in 2020 increased its entry teacher salary by $8,300, $6,000 of that an in-house pay raise.
In the Baton Rouge region, Iberville Parish’s entry-level pay for teachers is $55,006 a year, the highest in the region.
Livingston Parish schools, which historically have lagged behind its neighbors when it comes to pay, is asking voters on Saturday to reverse that by approving a new 1-cent sales tax. If voters agree, school employees in Livingston would receive a 10% pay raise or a minimum $2,500 yearly increase.
“I think we’re just at a crisis mode now,” John Blount, a member of a special board that developed the parishwide proposition, said earlier this year at a public meeting. “We’re at a time of crisis where we’re losing teachers so rapidly because other school districts are doing this and we seem to be the only one that’s not.”
East Baton Rouge Parish school leaders have been planning their own employee pay raise, one that would utilize existing district funds.
Last June, Supt. Sito Narcisse threw his support behind a proposal to increase employee salaries by 8% at first, but by a total of 12% over a three-year period. That three-year hike would amount to a $5,700 raise for starting teachers and a $6,500 raise for teachers on average.
“That would make us the leading (district) in the entire state in terms of attracting teachers,” Narcisse predicted. Actually, a few districts already pay more than that.
Just an 8% pay raise was estimated to cost East Baton Rouge an extra $27 million a year. It would be one of the biggest line items in the district’s $700 million budget.
Narcisse’s office is preparing the district budget for the 2023-24 school year, and he has yet to announce how big an employee pay raise he plans to propose. Chief Financial Officer Kelly Davis had said weekly meetings with board members to preview the new budget will begin in April. The budget proposal itself should be publicly available by mid-May.
Charter schools in Louisiana on average pay their teachers slightly less than traditional public schools, according to a May 2022 report from the Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s Office, but charter school pay ranges widely, with some schools significantly outpacing the market.
For instance, Indiana-based GEO Academies, which operates four schools in the Baton Rouge area, pays a hefty premium for its top tier of teachers.
“We currently pay executive teachers $75k (a year) and will be going to $80k this August,” said founder Kevin Teasley.
The state of Louisiana has been steadily increasing its contributions to the paychecks of school employees. This school year teachers received a $1,500 pay raise while support workers received an extra $750 a year.
State leaders are likely to increase pay again for school employees across the state, though the proposals on the table are for one-time stipends, not permanent pay raises.
Gov. John Bel Edwards and the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education have proposed paying $2,000 stipends to teachers and $1,000 to support workers. Edwards and BESE, however, disagree on what to do if the state’s Revenue Estimating Conference recognizes more money for spending when it meets, likely in May. Edwards wants to increase the teacher stipend to $3,000 and BESE wants select teachers to get stipends of $1,000 or more if they teach in critical shortage areas, are rated highly effective or meet other criteria.
Last year, the Legislature voted to create a special task force looking at teacher recruitment and retention. SSA Consultants of Baton Rouge is finishing a far-reaching compensation study for the task force.
The consulting firm is analyzing responses to an extensive survey conducted in October of the state’s 69 traditional school districts. The firm is also probing the various strategies other states, especially in the South, are employing to entice teachers.
Christel Slaughter, SSA’s chief executive officer, said Louisiana schools are trying a lot of things already to make themselves more attractive, from four-day work weeks to, in the case of Plaquemine Parish, supplying housing. Other states, though, are trying harder.
“There are not a lot of things we found that are absent from Louisiana,” Slaughter said. “Other states just do more, and they are richer and more robust.”
For instance, Virginia works with car dealers to obtain lower auto loan rates for educators. Kentucky is covering the cost of first-time teachers getting certified. And New Jersey is creating a $15 million “Teachers’ Village.”
Slaughter, however, cautions that better pay and incentives will go only so far.
“The pipeline is gone,” she said. “There are not a lot of people going into education.”
Absent boosting the ranks of those willing to work in schools, the pay wars may only increase current inequities, she said.
“We’re robbing Peter to pay Paul,” she said. “It’s not just about getting compensation a little higher so you can steal from your neighbors. We have to make this an attractive profession.”
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