District adopts $40,000 milestone teacher minimum
By Marcus Clem
The lowest-paid teacher in the St. Joseph School District will soon make $40,000 per year, with a 3.359% pay hike offered in many facets of staff pay after a Board of Education vote on Monday.
The board agreed to invest about $4.9 million into compensation for the 2024-25 year, with changes taking effect July 1. They passed up a less expensive option of hiking pay by 2.584%, despite warnings that the district will not have enough revenue coming in to cover either option. Instead, the district will have to tap its financial reserves. The lower cost option would have run at about $4.1 million.
“You’re going to deficit spend next year, OK? But I also know that there is a desire to do something for salaries,” Assistant Superintendent Robert Sigrist said.
The 3.359% hike is indexed up and down the district’s pay scale, so more experienced educators with more training will make more in proportion with junior teachers. The most experienced holder of a bachelor’s degree can now expect to earn $54,960 per year as a teacher. The highest-paid teacher will now be the holder of a doctorate who has many years of experience, qualifying them to earn $81,080.
The board was unanimous on the matter, despite significant concerns voiced about the prospect of having to make adjustments to account for the deficit later. Board member Whitney Lanning decried how the board’s rejection of the four-day class plan on Feb. 26 took away, as she described it, an option the district had to help staff without investing significant new monies.
“This makes me incredibly nervous,” Lanning said. “My concern here is — and I’m going to vote for it because I don’t know what else we could do — last month, we voted down an option that was very low cost. And now we’re getting into something that involves deficit spending. If we are going to just keep tapping the reserves, I worry that we will get to a negative point in the future. I think it just needs to be acknowledged that continuing to deficit spend is not a sustainable solution.”
Superintendent Gabe Edgar said he understood the concerns.
“I agree. Deficit spending is not anything that you want to continually get into,” he said. “I think I would like to rewind 13 months to when I told the Board of Education that we will have to prioritize what our ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ are. I don’t think you will have to freeze salaries. I’m confident to say that, and you guys know that my background is in this (school finance). It’s scary — and I’m not going to tell you that it’s not. Once you start to deficit spend, you have to stop.”
