Agenda - 09-30-2014 - 1-5 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Budeet Recommendations: Salaries: Our operational plan was originally built on the premise that all employees would receive a 3 percent salary increase. Employees have gone nearly 6 years with only a single 1.2 percent raise a few years ago. Insurance co -pay increases and declining benefits have resulted in our employees falling further and further behind financially. We have also seen our ability to recruit and retain talent negatively affected by what we can pay our employees. While the state provided a sizeable teacher raise, it did not do right by all of our employees. The state did not provide enough funding to keep our classified employees and administrators current with inflation (most employees only received a $500 increase) let alone address our recruitment and retention issues. We are recommending that the district provide an additional local raise to make up the difference between what was provided by the state and 3 percent for our classified employees, school based administrators, and central office administrators. Our original budget plan included $1,450,000 to provide all employees a 3 percent raise. Since the state authorized teacher raises at nearly double this amount and since the state did not provide similar levels of funding for other staff, we will need to increase our budget for salary increases for other staff. In addition, the state teacher salary schedule changes will result in a few teachers receiving less than a 3 percent increase. We are recommending a one -time bonus be provided so they receive at least 3 percent more pay than last year. We have also presented the results of a classified salary study and are in the midst of an administrative salary study. Accordingly, we have reserves to address salary equity and market pay issues identified in the studies, beginning first with those most out of line. In total, the district will need $2,500,935 to support these salary changes. Employees receiving local salary increases must have been employed by the district and have started working prior to July 1, 2014. Employees who were new to the district in 2013- 14 would receive the local portion of their increase at their anniversary date. Central Office and Transportation Reductions: We do not recommend accepting the state reductions for these areas. As a result, we will need to increase our local budget in these two areas. Teacher Assistants: As previously presented, the General Assembly reduced teacher assistant funding by approximately 22 percent or approximately $800,000. They moved the funding to classroom teacher positions to fund class size reductions at the elementary level. While state legislative leaders stated we could move it back to fund teacher assistants, financially it is an unwise course of action. It is recommended that we accept the state teacher assistant funding reduction. This will result in a loss of approximately 22 teacher assistant positions. We recommend changing the allocation formula to be one teacher assistant for every four classrooms in grades 4 and 5. We would then use the extra teacher positions to allocate teachers at a class size of 24. This is two fewer students than our current formula. Recall that just a few years ago, we were dealing with some grade 4 and 5 classrooms containing 31 students. In addition to a class size decrease, this would also result in significantly fewer instances of 415 combination 1 -- 2