By Diana Whittle
Teacher retention continues to challenge school districts in Arizona, and the Kyrene District is no exception.
So each year, Kyrene goes through a high-level of detail to ensure teachers’ pay is competitive, which includes a lengthy negotiation process between staff and the Governing Board, known as meet and confer.
At the forefront of the compensation discussion is Dr. Mark Knight, assistant superintendent of the district, who also is responsible for all human resource functions in the district.
“Kyrene is considered a coveted place to work, which we want to remain,” says Knight. “Part of the reason for our status is that we listen to employees and negotiate with them through our meet and confer process.”
To prepare for this year’s budget process, Kyrene teachers participated in a compensation survey, in which a total of 675 teachers, or 68 percent of the teaching population, participated. Another survey was completed with 92.4 percent of the district’s administrators.
For both teachers and administrators, the highest-rated request was to apply a cost-of-living increase across all positions. About 10 years ago the district abandoned a salary schedule that included automatic increases for inflation and moved to the performance-based model of pay.
Knight also was instrumental in the hiring of an outside consultant group, Fox and Lawson, to undertake a review of salary competitiveness for the 2015-16 fiscal year. The consultants’ task was to review four categories of school-district employees, including support personnel, selected directors, the speech language technician, and teachers in grades K -8.
Their finding was that Kyrene is falling behind nearby school districts in salary competitiveness and retention. Knight reports the current attrition rate for Kyrene teachers is about 10 percent a year.
Based on the Fox/Lawson recommendation, the Kyrene Governing Board wants to increase total compensation for employee groups from the current baselines to being in the top third or 67th percentile of comparable districts. This will require a three-year phased in approach and is designed to retain more teachers, Knight noted.
At the last Governing Board meeting, Knight, along with Jeremy Calles, the district’s chief financial officer, presented four compensation options to the Governing Board.
Calles said that the annual budget process is an important opportunity to present publicly the highest priority compensation items preferred by teachers.
“In my budget projections for the next five years, I include cost-of-living adjustments, the Fox/Lawson recommendations and the Performance Based Retention Plan to help retain teachers.”
This still may not be enough to attract new teachers, says Sue Cormier, a certified ombudsman who works with Knight on the meet and confer process, which also represents other employee groups in the district, such as administrative staff. She also is a part-time teacher at Kyrene’s del Cielo and de la Esperanza schools.
“Starting pay for a teacher with a bachelor’s degree begins at $36,200 in Kyrene, but the teachers believe that starting pay should be closer to $40,000 to be at a living wage,” said Cormier.
She says in addition to increasing starting pay, more needs to be done to attract new teachers to the profession.
Knight agrees that fewer students are choosing teaching as a career and that Kyrene continues to work with ASU to encourage student teaching opportunities.
Once Kyrene signs a contract with a teacher, the next goal is retention. For this reason, discussions will continue about increasing the value of the performance-base pay for long-term teachers. Currently, there is an additional payment of 2.5 percent given to a teacher after signing their seventh-year contract, but no further adjustments are given to a teacher with longer tenure.
Besides rewarding teachers who have experience, Kyrene considers the entire work environment for them.
“We use not only the amount of pay but working conditions, attrition and retention rates to help guide us to an agreement with our employee groups,” said Knight.
Knight expects that the Governing Board will allocate at least a one-percent cost-of-living raise, for the next fiscal year, at its Tuesday, March 22 meeting.
