Some Clark County teachers miss pay bump as pact terms change

When Ryan Omlie decided to go back to college while remaining a full-time elementary school teacher with a newborn son, it was with an understanding.

The Clark County School District would increase his salary for earning a master’s degree, as spelled out in the teacher contract.

Two years later, he has $15,000 in student debt, a master’s degree but no $3,700 raise.

“Money was already tight,” said the stressed third-grade teacher. “We’re going to have to figure out how to pay more bills with a smaller paycheck.”

Omlie, who earned his master’s this fall, had been receiving the raise for that since the beginning of the 2012-13 school year. But his salary was rolled back to its 2011-12 rate on Feb. 8, when an arbitrator ruled in favor of the district on contract terms for its 17,568 teachers.

The district fought the Clark County Education Association, the union bargaining for teachers, for pay freezes this school year, claiming it needed the $23 million to bring back about 415 teacher positions that were cut last year and alleviate crowded classes.

“I absolutely agree,” Omlie said of the need to decrease class sizes. He teaches 24 students at the southwest valley’s Fine Elementary School, which exceeds the profession’s suggested maximum of 21. “I would like some relief.”

He supports the freeze of automatic pay raises for seniority.

Up to now, the district has awarded teachers two kinds of automatic pay raises. The first bumps up teachers salaries by about $1,400 annually starting their third year in the district and caps it at the 15th year.

The second kind of pay raise is awarded to teachers who voluntarily earn college credits beyond their bachelor’s degree and pay for it themselves.

“You can take away the pay increase we’re given automatically, but I paid and worked and sacrificed for this,” Omlie said. “I had to go to class the weekend my son was born. For what?”

He asserts that teachers, like himself, who earned their college credits and advanced degrees — at the district’s urging, no less — should retain those raises. They should not be punished simply because they happened to finish their courses this school year, when the contract terms changed.

After all, the number of people affected is relatively small at 2,148, or 12 percent of district teachers. On the other hand, more than 63 percent of teachers — or 11,020 people — would have received automatic seniority raises, according to an email Superintendent Dwight Jones sent to teachers after the Feb. 8 arbitration decision.

“There is no getting around the fact that this might be very painful for many of the families in our community,” Jones wrote.

Omlie plans to tutor after school because his student loan payments will soon be demanded. His wife stays at home because working wouldn’t cover the cost of day care.

DISTRICT SAVINGS

Although Omlie represents a small teacher group, freezing his kind of pay increase provides a lot of savings to the district. The teachers supposed to have raises implemented for college credits this school year would, on average, receive $160 more per paycheck. Seniority raises average $63 per paycheck.

And the reason the arbitrator, Jay Fogelberg, sided with the district was the promised result of those huge savings — bringing back 415 teacher positions.

“This decision is being made with the assumption that their (the district’s) stated goal of hiring more teachers was made in good faith and will now be put into effect.”

District spokeswoman Amanda Fulkerson said some additional teachers will be put into classrooms for the rest of this school year to help overworked teachers. Although the district’s average class size is high at 33 students, some teachers have as many as 50 students in one class, Deputy Chief Financial Officer James McIntosh testified to the arbitrator.

“We’re looking at putting in as many as we can now,” Fulkerson said of the new teachers, noting that the majority of new teachers won’t be seen until next fall when they can be given their own classes.

The district already has 305 vacant teaching positions and is using long-term substitutes. About 187 of those positions are in the traditionally hard to hire fields of English, math, science and special education because they require extra skills.

Although the majority of the unfilled positions require just a four-year degree, Fulkerson argued that those positions “typically” remain vacant because principals don’t want to remove the long-term substitute midway through the school year.

A MESSAGE SENT

The hundreds of current vacancies “tell you something,” said one teacher who lost her seniority raise and wished to remain anonymous. She has a master’s degree in reading and another in school administration. Her student debt exceeds $100,000.

She said teachers usually take fast-track, partly online programs through schools like Nova University or Lesley University, which Omlie attended, because that’s the only way to do it while still working. But it’s more expensive than attending a traditional university.

Morale is low among Clark County teachers, she said.

“We’re disgusted by the whole thing. It’s like we’re pawns,” she said of the last two arbitrations.

That may be why an unusually large wave of 1,215 teachers voluntarily left the district last summer after an equally turbulent school year saw the district struggle to balance a shrinking budget. The district was forced to make $550 million in cuts over the past five years, Jones pointed out in his email. Summer departures are usually half of the 2012 summer exodus, about 600 every summer, according to district officials.

The 2011-12 school year was spent arguing over the same thing as this year — teacher salaries. The district wanted to freeze salaries then, but lost in arbitration and cut 1,015 teaching positions to cover the cost of teacher raises. The district ultimately brought those positions back because 1,215 teachers took jobs in other districts, retired or left education altogether.

Long before that, Omlie, 26, felt in­secure about his job.

“I can’t remember a year I was told my job wasn’t in jeopardy,” said Omlie, who has been warned at the end of every year since 2008 that he may be “surplused,” meaning the school lost his position and he could be picked up at another school, or return to the same school should enrollment rise.

Contact reporter Trevon Milliard at
tmilliard@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0279.