Summer school teachers’ salaries were the subject of a public comment at the Feb. 20 Platte County School Board meeting.
Leona Baskerville, an executive officer of the Platte County Education Association and a member of Team Platte County addressed the board about the salary recommendations that were discussed at Team Platte County’s previous meeting on Jan. 7. She asked how the district justified adding three new administrative positions for teachers to fulfill administrative requirements.
Director of Communications for the Platte County School District, Laura Hulett, said district leadership hoped to clarify some of the statements given at the meeting.
On the subject of an increase in pay for summer school teachers Baskerville said that the board was providing extra opportunities for the administrators, but Hulett said it wasn’t in lieu of teacher pay and that Platte County schools are in the top five out of 15 school districts in the area as far as competitive pay.
“Any teacher has the opportunity to apply for the summer school administrator positions,” Hulett said. “In the past we have had one per summer school site, because we don’t open all of the buildings for summer school. But the addition of those administrator assistants was just to give more opportunities for people to try out. Assistant positions will be paid at the teacher pay, not at the administrator pay.”
Dr. Rob Gardner, Assistant Superintendent for Personnel and Operations, shared, “This is a pathway for us to ‘grow our own’ and for teachers to gain leadership experience.”
Hulett said that administrators at each site get paid a little bit more than the summer school teachers, but these are generally teachers who are looking for future leadership opportunities.
“It wasn’t to fulfill graduate hours; it has nothing to do with that,” Hulett said. “Most of these teachers who want to pursue leadership are also pursuing their graduate degree, but it wasn’t to create extra opportunities.”
Although summer school pay has not increased like teacher pay, Hulett said both are paid by comparison to the other local school districts. She said the board doesn’t want to fall behind and lose any teachers to different districts because they are not being paid competitively.
“We want to continue to attract quality teachers, but because we were still competitive in the district rankings we didn’t propose an increase for summer school teachers,” Hulett said.
Every summer Team Platte County and the school district work together to use the anticipated revenue in the district’s budget for salary increases and they work together through negotiation on where the money will go.
Baskerville raised concerns at the February meeting that the district administration had chosen to circumvent Team Platte County in the salary discussions.
Hulett believes there was a possible misunderstanding between district leadership and Baskerville.
“I believe Miss Baskerville thought that we were doing the same type of thing before summer school pay was proposed,” Hulett said. “The district was thinking that would be for the following year summer school pay so we would talk about it in the summer.” The February approval process for summer school salaries has been in place at PCR-3 for many years.
Team Platte County’s purpose is to progressively attract, develop, and retain a high quality staff through collaborative communication in order to continually improve employee satisfaction.
“At the meeting there was discussion between board members, Dr. Mike Reik, and Dr. Gardner after Miss Baskerville had left about how we need to proceed with the summer school pay approval so that we can advertise and allow our teachers to apply for positions, but we would go back to Team Platte County at the regularly scheduled meeting in March and decide with the whole representative group if we need to make changes,” Hulett said.
Hulett said feedback, positive or negative, is very important to the school board so they can continuously improve.
“One of the first things I heard from Dr. Reik when I first started was that ‘we treat feedback as a gift,’” Hulett said. “We want people to be proud of being a Platte County Pirate, we want to honor our tradition. We want to look towards the future and we want to learn from our mistakes.”