EDLD 5342 Week 4, Part 4

My district is a small district (550 students in grades K=12) and is also a property poor district.  Our total personnel salaries make up 70.63% of our budget or $3,600,000. Obviously, salaries are a huge part of the total budget.  When looking at the actual positions funded, I found that every teacher is utilized fully in each period of the day, minus their conference period.  This streamlining was even further accentuated by not replacing a fine arts teacher who retired and combining some administrative duties when one administrator left the district.  The district also got a waiver for elementary class size so we could further reduce the number of teachers on that campus.  One teacher was cut from the middle school campus and his duties covered by reducing the number of sections per grade level.  Several stipends were taken away, such as those given in the past to lead teachers, academic contests sponsors, and some small ones given to math and science teachers.  All aides, maintenance, transportation, janitorial, and other non-teachers were limited to no overtime pay in order to keep a handle on salaries even better. If our teachers were given a 5% raise it would mean that the district would be required to come up with an additional $180,000 in a very tight budget year.  The only way the district could honor such an increase would be to cut the budgets of extracurricular budgets, which have already been slashed by as much as 30%. I don’t see any possible way that the teachers can be given a raise, even if it is smaller than 5%.