LITTLE ROCK — The gap between the haves and have-nots among Arkansas schoolteachers has widened.
Despite tax increases for schools and the Supreme Court signing off on the state’s education funding system, teachers are still paid more - or less - depending on where they teach.
In the 2008-2009 school year, the average salary difference between the top-paying district and the lowest-paying district was $23,394.
That’s about $1,000 more than the $22,372 salary disparity seven years earlier.
“We’re crying over the same spilled milk,” said Sen. Steve Bryles, D-Blytheville.
Rep. Nancy Blount, D-Marianna, worries about low-paying districts “getting what’s left over” among teachers.
See the list of school district salaries.
State Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell says that, generally, students being taught by low-paid teachers are disadvantaged compared with those learning from high-paid teachers. He said state recruiting incentives for teachers at low-paying districts haven’t helped much.
“I’m not sure we’ve got an answer,” Kimbrell said.
Some say the state’s 244 districts should follow the same salary schedule, meaning a teacher with the same experience would be paid the same, no matter the district.
Others call for more state subsidies.
Another idea is to further consolidate districts - Blount suggests one in each county - to reduce operational inefficiencies inherent to small districts with low student-teacher ratios.
Of the 10 districts paying the highest average salary, five have enrollments of more than 10,000.
Of the 10 districts paying the lowest average, nine have fewer than 600 students each.
TALENT POOL
The state Department of Education, upon request, provided the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette salary averages for each district from the 2002-2003 school year - the year before the Legislature raised taxes for schools - through the 2008-2009 school year. The newspaper sorted that data to determine disparities among districts.
Fayetteville, the district with the state’s flagship university, had the highest average in 2008-2009 with $59,219. The district consistently ranked at or near the top each year.
“I believe that it helps us draw from an incredible pool of talent,” said Fayetteville Superintendent Vicki Thomas.
She said the district has no shortage of applications from teachers who want to work there and is continually in “friendly competition” with other large districts in Northwest Arkansas to be the one with the highest salary.
The top-five paying districts, and six of the top 10, are in Northwest Arkansas.
Local property wealth also affects a district’s ability to pay its teachers.
Fayetteville, with 8,512 students, raised $46.3 million in property taxes off a rate of 43 mills.
Midland, in Independence County, offered the lowest average at $35,825. It has 522 students and raised just short of $1 million off 39 mills.
Dean Stanley, superintendent of Midland, said his district is struggling to recover from the financial problems that led to its state takeover and “massive turnover” among teachers. The state released the district back to local control a couple of years ago.
But the district now has mostly inexperienced younger teachers who fall lower on the pay scale, which leads to a lower district average, Stanley said.
“We can’t compete with Northwest Arkansas,” said Stanley, superintendent since state control ended.
He rejects the notion that students in his district are disadvantaged, saying his teachers are dedicated to the community.
“Our kids are not suffering,” Stanley said.
He opposes further district consolidation. He would accept more state funding for teacher salaries but doubts, because of the poor economy, that will happen.
Kimbrell said it’s surprising that none of the bottom 10 are districts in the Delta, an area with a mostly black student population and generally thought of as the poorest region of the state. The state’s school-funding lawsuit was filed by Lake View, a poor,mostly black district in Phillips County.
The bottom 10 districts are in mostly white, rural areas that are sparsely populated.
Kimbrell said teachers in Delta districts may benefit from extra state money given because of that region’s high concentration of poverty. Delta districts may have more students, which gives them more state money. They also may have lower transportation costs than the tiny districts with the lowest salaries.
LAKE VIEW
Teacher salary disparity was a key issue in the 2002 Supreme Court opinion which found the state’s funding system to be inadequate and inequitable.
The Lake View district had the lowest average salary that year at $23,867, which at the time was about half of Fayetteville’s.
During a special legislative session in 2003-2004, the state increased school funding and raised the minimum teacher salary from $21,860 to $27,500. (It was raised to $29,244 for 2008-2009 but the Legislature didn’t increase it for this school year.) State taxes were raised by $400 million a year to pay for the overhaul.
Bryles said the changes “just raised everybody up” and didn’t address disparities.
Legislators said they didn’t want to reward district inefficiencies. They chose to fund districts on a per-student basis and set the minimum district size at 350 students. This led to the consolidation of about 60 districts, including Lake View.
They also recognized that Amendment 74 of the state constitution, to some extent, allows inequality. The amendment sets 25 mills as the minimum property-tax rate for maintenance and operation for schools but permits each district to tax at a higher rate if its patrons vote to do so.
In 2007, the Supreme Court gave its approval to the state’s education overhaul.
Gov. Mike Beebe said that overall the state is “doing much better” on teacher salaries in recent years.
The state’s average teacher salary has increased from $37,536 in 2002-2003 to $45,761 in 2008-2009.
For 2007-2008, the latest data available from the National Education Association, Arkansas ranked 35th nationally in average teacher salary for its 35,000 teachers. The state trails only Texas and Louisiana among its surrounding states.
Beebe echoed the Supreme Court in saying that some salary disparities are unavoidable as long as the state uses a per-student funding system.
“The only way to [end the disparities] is if you didn’t have smaller schools, and we already know that the people prefer to have a variety of school sizes,” Beebe said.
The governor acknowledged that districts with higher salaries have more choices when hiring teachers.
“But I don’t think it naturally follows that if you pay somebody less it means they’re not going to be as good a teacher,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of good teachers that are making too little money.”
He said the only remedy would be to give small districts “a heckuva lot” more money per student than larger districts. But he said that would probably be unconstitutional.
LOCAL CONTROL
The state already provides small and poor districts more money per student than larger districts to help make up for low property-tax collections in small districts.
Fort Smith Superintendent Benny Gooden said adding even more state dollars to small districts would unfairly reward low-paying districts when larger districts such as his have made high salaries a top priority.
“We realize in big districts that you absolutely must manage your staffing level,” Gooden said. “That’s where most of the money is.”
A statewide salary schedule equalizing salaries or a cap on salaries would be bad, he said.
“We make choices in how much we pay to meet our local needs,” Gooden said. “If you believe in any modicum of local control, staffing is one thing we have left.”
But Blount favors such state action.
“It’s very unfair and unfortunate that people can make twice as much as people doing the same thing with the same credentials with the same experience,” she said.
The price tag? “In the billions probably,” she said, adding that district consolidation and tax increases would have to pay for it.
Rich Nagel, the executive director of the Arkansas Education Association, said he knows the money isn’t there to greatly increase salaries because of the economy.
He takes comfort that the gap, while widening on a dollar basis, isn’t widening on a percentage basis.
“The low end seems to be growing a little faster percentage-wise than the high end,” he said.
The state has programs that provide incentives to some districts to draw teachers. One, the “Act 101 program” sent about $1.6 million for salary supplements to 12 districts in the Delta.
Another fledgling program helps teachers with housing costs.
But Kimbrell, the education commissioner, said those incentives aren’t great enough and don’t reach enough districts to be effective.
“The approach we have to take as a state is to grow a desire for the best and brightest to be teachers at [low-paying] schools,” he said.
That’s especially a challenge in areas of the Delta without a nearby university “churning out” teachers. Rural areas also offer fewer housing choices for new teachers, he said.
Bryles said there is little the state can do to help some districts.
“We could give them a house and pay them a higher salary, and I don’t think that’s going to attract teachers,” he said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/20/2009