When Matt Westmoreland, Atlanta Board of Education’s District 3 representative, first began teaching at Carver Early College in 2010, he began on the lowest salary step for APS. As a first-year teacher with a bachelor’s degree, Westmoreland was supposed to move up to the second salary step in the 2011-2012 school year, but, like every other employee in APS, Westmoreland received no pay raise.
Since the 2008-2009 school year, the APS salary scale has been frozen for all employees. On April 22, however, the Atlanta Board of Education voted to allocate $15 million of the $658 million general fund to APS employee raises, making this year the first in five that teachers, bus drivers, security guards and other APS employees received a raise. This budget cycle will run from July 1, until June 30, 2015.
Other notable items in this year’s budget include $25 million in reserve funds, something that also hasn’t been added to the budget for five years; $12 or $13 million in state-regulated health-care benefits; and $74 million to charter schools.
During the process of divvying up the $15 million for raises, the Board of Education budget commission committee considered three potential plans.
The first plan, which was first discussed in early January, would have given every APS employee a 3 percent raise. This problem with this plan was that APS wanted to give more to teachers and other APS employees who spent longer times without pay increases.
The second plan, which took into account the desire to give more senior teachers and other staff larger raises, involved a 3.8 percent raise for any APS employee who had been employed for two to four years and a 5.6 percent raise for employees who had been employed for four years or longer. The board rejected this plan, however, because staff members who left their job, either to earn an advanced degree or for some other reason, were not allowed to return to their former salary bracket, a common practice before 2008.
The third plan, which was implemented when the budget was approved on April 22, proposed giving faculty and staff pay raises based on when they began their job with APS. For example, faculty and staff hired in the fiscal year of 2013 receive a 1 percent raise, and faculty and staff hired in 2012 receive a 2 percent pay raise. Any faculty or staff member hired in 2009 or earlier receives a 5 percent pay raise. Most staff members received their raise in the form of a single bonus on Aug. 29. Year-round employees, however, received their single bonus on July 31.
Although the main reason for the raises was the increase in APS revenue for this fiscal year, the entirely new Board of Education was clearly committed to the pay increase.
“When we got elected last fall and began in January,” Westmoreland said, “we committed as a board to do three things with this budget: one was to give people a raise, two was to not have furlough days, and the third was to pass the budget in April—that is a month earlier than normal and two month earlier than the year before—and this year we met those three goals.”
Furlough days—four days of the school year where all APS employees would not be required to come to work, but would also not get paid—were recently imposed in the 2012-2013 school year.
Before the recession, APS had a reputation for giving teachers and other staff members some of the best salaries in the Atlanta Metropolitan area. Economics and statistics teacher John Rives said this trend continued through the 2008 recession.
“The City of Atlanta public schools’ salary scale has always been the highest in the state of Georgia for a number of years,” Rives said, “although there are some more rural counties that are raising their salaries quite rapidly because of the influx of people.”
Rives gave the example of Cherokee County, located north of Atlanta. Since the student population in that county is growing so quickly, Rives said, Cherokee County School District and other nearby districts, like APS, will have pressure from one another to offer good salaries.
Despite the competition, Rives has faith that APS will continue to bring in high qualified, engaging teachers into the system.
Louis Sartor, a social studies teacher, however, thinks that APS let go of some of its core-subject teachers during the recession and will continue to struggle with keeping teachers in those areas.
“I think we did lose some teachers,” Sartor said, “particularly in the areas like science, math and foreign language where maybe they have more options.”
In the years leading up to the 2008-2009 salary freeze, APS employees worked for their salary on a system called a step increase system. Each year a teacher, a bus driver, or any staff member would work for APS, they would receive an increased salary compared to the previous school year. If any employee received an advanced degree, they would also receive a pay increase. In the past five years, however, APS continued to give employees this salary increase. Finally, APS employees would also receive what would what was known as a cost-of-living adjustment. A cost-of-living adjustment would work as a single bonus to help APS staff to offset the impacts of inflation.
If APS were to move every employee back to their proper step, Westmoreland said, it would take more than $60 million of the budget.
Westmoreland also anticipates that APS will return to giving teachers and other staff step increases and other salary enhancements in the coming years.
Although this salary increase is the first of many steps to APS’s budget recovery, Westmoreland believes this first bonus will be very welcomed.
“I was a teacher, and I got taught by a lot of teachers,” Westmoreland said. “I don’t know of any [person] who becomes an educator for the money, so I think it is appreciated when we thank teachers for the incredible work that they do.”
