Increasing the required minimum starting salary for Arkansas teachers would cost the state anywhere from $121,000 to more than $2.35 million, the Bureau of Legislative Research told legislators Monday.
The Senate and House Education committees met jointly Monday to hear the cost of three proposed plans to raise the salary base -- which has lagged behind the salary bases in other states over the past decade. The committees also heard a report on how salaries for Arkansas' school administrators compare with those in other states.
Legislators asked in March for a cost analysis of what it would take to increase the minimum salary for starting teachers by 1 percent, by 2 percent and to a blanket $31,000 from the current minimum of $29,244 for a brand new teacher with a bachelor's degree. Staff members at the research bureau said the increase would also make it necessary to raise pay for teachers with more years of experience as well, and included that projection in the cost analysis.
"There were four questions we asked on each proposal: How much would each proposal cost? How much would each proposal affect the [salary] matrix? How much would each proposal affect salary disparities among districts? What would it cost to expand the current salary schedule?" said Nell Smith, an analyst with the bureau.
A proposal to increase the base pay by 1 percent to $29,536 would cost the state's school districts a total of about $121,000 if teachers at the 14 higher-experience pay grades also received the 1 percent bump. The cost would be between $105 and $18,858 for individual school districts, and the average cost would be about $5,500 per year.
The proposal to increase the current base salary by 2 percent to $29,829 would cost $333,285 for the state's school districts with the accompanying bump for the other pay grades. The cost for individual school districts would range from $62 to $37,720, with the average being $9,000.
A third proposal floated by the committees at a joint meeting in March asked the bureau to look at what it would cost to increase the minimum pay to $31,000 -- an almost 6 percent jump from the current level. Smith said bureau staff members estimated the cost would be about $2,354,681 with costs for districts ranging from $31.86 to $125,856. The average cost would be about $20,838.
Some school districts would not be affected by some or all of the increase scenarios because they already pay higher than the recommended base pay.
Teachers unions often help negotiate pay raises and higher starting salaries for individual districts, and school boards also use starting pay as an incentive to attract new teachers. According to the research bureau, the Springdale School District had the highest starting salary for 2012-13 at $44,570, followed closely by Bentonville, Rogers and Fayetteville, which all paid more than $41,000.
According to Arkansas Department of Education numbers from the 2012-13 school year, eight of Arkansas' then-239 school districts used the state-required minimum salary for new teachers with no previous experience. Also according to those numbers, 30 districts used starting salaries of less than $30,000, and 77 districts started teachers at a salary of less than $31,000.
The last large increase in the state-mandated minimum pay was in 2004, when the Legislature increased it from $21,860 to $27,500. Over the past 10 years, that minimum salary has increased by only $1,744.
When the 2004 increase went into effect, Arkansas' rank for minimum teacher pay among 16 states belonging to the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Education Board -- one of several nonpartisan, nonprofit interstate regional compacts for education advocacy across the country -- increased to seventh, but dropped over the years until it hit 12th for 2012-13.
The regional group includes the 11 states that seceded from the union, plus Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia, Delaware and Maryland.
Bureau staff members also presented a study on the average Arkansas school administrator salaries compared with neighboring and other states in or near the South.
On average, Arkansas school superintendents earned $107,295 annually including bonuses and incentives but not benefits, according to the bureau's report Monday.
The study broke the superintendent salaries into three categories -- the first for districts with 300 to 2,499 students, the second for districts with between 2,500 and 9,999 students, and the third for districts with more than 10,000 students.
The average salary for superintendents in the 194 smaller Arkansas school districts was $95,313, compared with about $108,000 for the national median.
The median salaries for superintendents at the 38 medium-sized schools was $138,975, in line with the national median salary of $143,000 for women and $150,000 for men. The seven superintendents in the state's seven largest districts make more money than the national median for superintendents managing large schools -- $204,500 compared with about $171,000 nationally.
Assistant superintendents, which do not exist in every school district, made an average of $104,834 in salary in the 2012-13 school year.
Principals made $78,507 on average in Arkansas; those in larger schools tended to make more. Principals overseeing high schools generally made more than those working in elementary and middle schools, the study found.
Arkansas ranked ninth out of 15 Southern states for average principal salary, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
In October, the committees will decide whether to recommend that the General Assembly increase educators' salaries as part of the biannual adequacy study.
Metro on 06/10/2014