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Set a goal for teachers' pay raises

There are two things you can count on when it comes to pay raises for Hernando County school teachers:

The amount is never enough.

And budgeting the raises never becomes the priority that School Board members promise to make it.

Which raises the perennial question: Will that ever change?

The teachers union bargaining team soon will ask its rank-and-file members to ratify a contract that gives them a 4 percent raise. It has taken them months of negotiating with the superintendent's representatives to settle on that modest increase.

Even with the raise, teachers in Hernando County still will be some of the lowest-paid in Florida, earning about $5,400 a year less than the state average. At the beginning of the school year, Hernando ranked 60th among the state's 67 counties for an average teacher's salary. This scrawny pay hike won't do much, if anything, to change that status.

School Board members often are criticized for waiting until the rest of the budget is fixed before deciding what raises they can afford to give teachers, as well as the district's blue- and white-collar workers. As employees complain about being fed the crumbs that fall from the budgeting table, they plead for the board and its administrative leaders to decide early on what the teachers deserve and take that amount off the top of the spending plan.

It has never happened, and partly for good reason. The school district cannot set its final budget until the state Legislature and Department of Education pass down their mandates and allocations. Because of that scheduling, teachers usually start the school year with no idea how much their raise will be or when it will show up in their paychecks.

This year, in particular, was a difficult one for budgeting. Excessive costs for fuel, health insurance and trying to comply with the voter-mandated class size amendment all competed with tax money available for pay raises.

Yet teachers correctly pointed out that the district found sizable amounts of money to pursue the superintendent's attempt to fire Powell Middle School principal Michael Ransaw, and to fend off his unusual legal challenges to that decision.

Although teachers did not resort to working only the 73/4 hours per day stipulated in their contract, as they have twice in the past 9 years, it is clear that this year's extended bargaining session has had a significant negative impact.

Brian Phillips, Hernando Classroom Teachers Association president, told the Times last week: "My teachers . . . are not happy. They don't trust the district, and they don't trust the School Board."

The School Board may have put a little shine on that tarnished perception Tuesday night when its members - actually just three of them - voted to reduce their own pay raises so they would not earn a salary higher than a beginning teacher.

Board members John Druzbick, Robert Wiggins and Pat Fagan led the way for all the board members to accept only a 1.5-percent raise, or $453, which brings their annual pay to $30,200, the same as a first-year teacher. Based on population estimates from the state, they could have given themselves a 4.6 percent, or $1,381, raise.

The action was commendably symbolic. But it falls far short of what the board members could do in the next few months as they work with the superintendent to prepare the next budget. A meaningful step, which would send employees a tangible sign of their intent, would be to set a goal - a percentage range - for how much money they will make available for pay raises next year.

[Last modified December 15, 2005, 10:19:10]