Study Reveals FCPS Teacher Career Salaries $142K Below Average of Regional Peers

[Anonymous]

At $65,000, I'm calculating $41 per hour for this teacher not including benefits and retirement. It could be down to $35 per hour if the job requires as many additional hours as teachers say it does. I'm sure the pension and additional health benefits provide at least an additional $5 per hour over the private sector though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:if a person working 'full-time' at 40 hours a week is 2080 hours a year. Take 4 weeks off for holidays and vacations (160 hours) makes $85K (hourly rate of around $43) as a federal employee or contractor- I would love to see comparable match for teachers. (Not overtime or grading papers at home or anything like that- just time at work because the rest of us do overtime and business travel, etc).

I feel for teachers and know they have a hard job but they have perfected whining about how hard they have it. Working sucks for everyone.

Okay, sure.

Let's go with 40 hours per week at 38.8 weeks (194 days) for teacher contracts. That's 1552 hours. I made about $52k last year, so $33.50/hour. Technically my lunch doesn't count for my hours (though that's usually when I attend IEPs, have lunch duty, counsel my students, or hold kids for detention), so if you want to look at my job on paper I only work 7.5 hour days and it would be $35.70 per hour.

How do you have 8 hours days? Is your daily contract that long? Or does this include additional time that you're required to get the job done? How many years have you been teaching?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The amounts given for club advising and coaching is incredibly small compared to the time put in. Like $2,000 to be a head coach.

For how many weeks of work?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:At $65,000, I'm calculating $41 per hour for this teacher not including benefits and retirement. It could be down to $35 per hour if the job requires as many additional hours as teachers say it does. I'm sure the pension and additional health benefits provide at least an additional $5 per hour over the private sector though.

What about Arlington teachers? Are their salaries calculated using a different method, or the same?

[Anonymous]

Does the head coach of the Football team truly spend a month out of the summer, weekend evenings, hours after school for practice and possibly doing some team travel for $2000??

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:At $65,000, I'm calculating $41 per hour for this teacher not including benefits and retirement. It could be down to $35 per hour if the job requires as many additional hours as teachers say it does. I'm sure the pension and additional health benefits provide at least an additional $5 per hour over the private sector though.

What about Arlington teachers? Are their salaries calculated using a different method, or the same?

I realize Arlington is close by to some FCPS schools, but you have to remember that the state is giving FCPS money based on salaries for the entire state. Arlington is a small piece of this. They are not necessarily just looking at the metro Washington area. Arlington is a very small inner suburb school system.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:if a person working 'full-time' at 40 hours a week is 2080 hours a year. Take 4 weeks off for holidays and vacations (160 hours) makes $85K (hourly rate of around $43) as a federal employee or contractor- I would love to see comparable match for teachers. (Not overtime or grading papers at home or anything like that- just time at work because the rest of us do overtime and business travel, etc).

I feel for teachers and know they have a hard job but they have perfected whining about how hard they have it. Working sucks for everyone.

Okay, sure.

Let's go with 40 hours per week at 38.8 weeks (194 days) for teacher contracts. That's 1552 hours. I made about $52k last year, so $33.50/hour. Technically my lunch doesn't count for my hours (though that's usually when I attend IEPs, have lunch duty, counsel my students, or hold kids for detention), so if you want to look at my job on paper I only work 7.5 hour days and it would be $35.70 per hour.

How do you have 8 hours days? Is your daily contract that long? Or does this include additional time that you're required to get the job done? How many years have you been teaching?

Shoot, you're right--it's 7.5. Contract hours are 7:10-2:40, with mandated 90 minutes of after school tutoring per week. So it comes to 7.8 hours per day if you average that out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:if a person working 'full-time' at 40 hours a week is 2080 hours a year. Take 4 weeks off for holidays and vacations (160 hours) makes $85K (hourly rate of around $43) as a federal employee or contractor- I would love to see comparable match for teachers. (Not overtime or grading papers at home or anything like that- just time at work because the rest of us do overtime and business travel, etc).

I feel for teachers and know they have a hard job but they have perfected whining about how hard they have it. Working sucks for everyone.

Okay, sure.

Let's go with 40 hours per week at 38.8 weeks (194 days) for teacher contracts. That's 1552 hours. I made about $52k last year, so $33.50/hour. Technically my lunch doesn't count for my hours (though that's usually when I attend IEPs, have lunch duty, counsel my students, or hold kids for detention), so if you want to look at my job on paper I only work 7.5 hour days and it would be $35.70 per hour.

How do you have 8 hours days? Is your daily contract that long? Or does this include additional time that you're required to get the job done? How many years have you been teaching?

Shoot, you're right--it's 7.5. Contract hours are 7:10-2:40, with mandated 90 minutes of after school tutoring per week. So it comes to 7.8 hours per day if you average that out.

Teaching 7 years, career switcher with 5 years of IT consulting prior to teaching.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:At $65,000, I'm calculating $41 per hour for this teacher not including benefits and retirement. It could be down to $35 per hour if the job requires as many additional hours as teachers say it does. I'm sure the pension and additional health benefits provide at least an additional $5 per hour over the private sector though.

What about Arlington teachers? Are their salaries calculated using a different method, or the same?

I realize Arlington is close by to some FCPS schools, but you have to remember that the state is giving FCPS money based on salaries for the entire state. Arlington is a small piece of this. They are not necessarily just looking at the metro Washington area. Arlington is a very small inner suburb school system.

The report, which OP referenced, compares FCPS teacher salaries to the teacher salaries of nearby districts, including DC and MD. I was simply trying to point out that salaries are relative, and FCPS teacher salaries are low compared to neighboring teacher salaries.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Well it's 180 days of school correct? The typical contract length ranges from 194 days to 260 days. I think about 200 is average. A typical school day is about 6.5 hours of which a teacher gets off about 0.5 hours. Planning time is built into the remaining 6 hours. 200 days x 6 hours = 1200 hours per year. If you wanted to add 1 hour of extra planning/grading time per day just add an additional 180-200 hours. You can divide whatever teacher pay (including or not including benefits) by these amounts to get an hourly rate.

FCPS teacher contracts are 7.5 hours per day. .5 hours of that is lunch time. The vast majority of teachers use lunch time to check email, reach out to parents, and to run lunch groups with kids.

You say that planning time is built into the school day. Here's the truth. In our elementary school, each teacher gets 1 hour of "planning time" per day. 1 out of 5 days a week, it is a mandatory Collaborative Learning Team meeting - a meeting with other teachers who teach your grade, plus special education teachers, other specialists, and administrators. So that leaves you 4 hours of planning a week. Now, that "planning time" also includes dropping off and picking up your students from another specialist -- so it may take 5-10 minutes in each direction to walk your whole class down to the gym and then go down and pick them up. So, let's say, generously, that you have 45 minutes a day to plan.

Each day, you teach blocks of 90 minutes of Language Arts, 60 minutes of Math, 45 minutes of Social Studies, 45 minutes of Science, and 30 minutes of Health. Then there is a remediation block where you are supposed to plan individualized activities for all of your students - extra help for kids who need remediation, enrichment for those who need enrichment. So, at the very least, you have to plan lessons and activities for 5 different subjects. Within Language Arts and Math, you are required to have rotations for different activities for groups at different levels. So, you're not just planning one lesson; you're planning a group lesson plus 4 additional activities.

Now, I've worked in professional fields other than teaching. And generally, when I had to do an hour-long presentation, I would take at least that long to plan for it. So, teachers are planning for 4 or 5 different blocks of instruction per day. By planning, I mean, designing the lesson, creating activities, creating SMART Board presentations or handouts, designing assessments, and making materials available online or making paper copies, locating and organizing manipulatives, etc. Do you really think any teacher can actually design quality instruction for 4 or 5 different subjects a day in just 45 minutes?!?!

On top of that, teachers are answering parent emails, returning parent calls, meeting with administrators, meeting to collaborate with specialists like a Reading Specialist and Technology Specialist, attending IEP meetings, creating spreadsheets of data, analyzing data, and, oh yeah, grading papers.

All that is supposed to happen during this planning time as well. Yeah, right.

When I taught high school, I my contract hours were up around 2:30. I stayed in the building until at least 6:30 every night, and I STILL took work home on nights and weekends. On average, I worked an additional 25 hours during the week and maybe 4-8 hours on the weekend, some weekends longer. That's IN ADDITION to the school day.

Every "vacation" - like winter break and spring break -- I'd work at least a 40 hour week grading projects and papers, planning units, and writing college recommendation letters for 80-100 kids. Summers, I'd go in early to get my classroom set up, take classes, and spend a lot of time reading and preparing for the next year (especially when you find out that all of a sudden you're teaching another grade or subject the next year and have to learn a whole new curriculum.)

Every job I have ever had in the private sector - including a technology company and on Capitol Hill - was significantly less stressful and less time consuming. Most professionals can take coffee breaks, bathroom breaks, and DCUM breaks whenever they want during the day. They can stop and talk to colleagues about work or your weekend or the news when you need a mental break. Teachers can't. When teachers need to take sick days, they have to spend hours writing lesson plans and creating activities for a person to do in their absence. None of that time is part of the built in "planning time" at school. There's no such thing as comp time or flex time.

I'm not complaining. I love my job. But I get furious when I hear people claim that we work 6.5 hour days and have all this time off. If FCPS teachers "worked to the rule" - that is, only worked their actual contract hours and did NO uncompensated work other than that - this entire system would grind to a complete halt. The school system DEPENDS on teachers planning and grading beyond contract hours and supervising clubs and extracurriculars and helping students after school and spending breaks and summers planning, preparing, and grading. So stop evaluating our compensation as if we were factory workers who got to leave when the whistle blows.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We just lost the best teacher any of our children have had in FCPS to Arlington. Multiple kids and lots of teachers, so sad to lose this one and concerned about who else we might lose.

As a Fairfax County parent and taxpayer (and FCPS employee) this is my biggest concern. Our elementary school had classroom vacancies from mid-summer until halfway through October this year because every single halfway decent candidate who would interview and be offered the job ended up taking a job in Loudoun or Arlington. And it's not just the salary difference, though that is substantial. Our average class sizes are MUCH bigger than surrounding counties. Our average special education caseloads are much higher per teacher. So, would you rather teach a class of 22 4th graders (4 of whom are mainstreamed special education students) for $55K a year, or teach a class of 32 4th graders, 14 of whom are mainstreamed special education students, for $46K a year? Most people with better options took them. And so our kids started the year with subs. And the people we hired in October are not the same in terms of quality and experience than the people we lost to neighboring counties.

Is that what you want for your kids? Not me.

This is what chronic under-funding has done.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
My husband teaches in FCPS. He has a Masters degree and 15 years of teaching experience (10 of them at the same FCPS school) - he makes about $65k.

Shouldn't he be making more than 70K? That's what the salary schedule says.

Yes, but there were pay freezes and a few years that they froze step increases This is the problem.

I also have a Masters and 15 years experience in FCPS (same school), and make about $75,000.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We just lost the best teacher any of our children have had in FCPS to Arlington. Multiple kids and lots of teachers, so sad to lose this one and concerned about who else we might lose.

As a Fairfax County parent and taxpayer (and FCPS employee) this is my biggest concern. Our elementary school had classroom vacancies from mid-summer until halfway through October this year because every single halfway decent candidate who would interview and be offered the job ended up taking a job in Loudoun or Arlington. And it's not just the salary difference, though that is substantial. Our average class sizes are MUCH bigger than surrounding counties. Our average special education caseloads are much higher per teacher. So, would you rather teach a class of 22 4th graders (4 of whom are mainstreamed special education students) for $55K a year, or teach a class of 32 4th graders, 14 of whom are mainstreamed special education students, for $46K a year? Most people with better options took them. And so our kids started the year with subs. And the people we hired in October are not the same in terms of quality and experience than the people we lost to neighboring counties.

Is that what you want for your kids? Not me.

This is what chronic under-funding has done.

Yes, pretty much all of the teachers from the new Discovery Elementary in Arlington came from FCPS. And why not? It's like a $10,000 raise and a brand new school.

[Anonymous]

The majority of people responding to this just want to complain about the people teaching our youth, our future and their salaries. The posters are missing the point. FCPS teachers get paid considerably less than teachers surrounding them(within a mile in places). The question is, why? And of course they are flocking to different counties for 10k more. We've seen 4 wonderful teachers leave our FCPS to teach in Arlington this past year alone.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well it's 180 days of school correct? The typical contract length ranges from 194 days to 260 days. I think about 200 is average. A typical school day is about 6.5 hours of which a teacher gets off about 0.5 hours. Planning time is built into the remaining 6 hours. 200 days x 6 hours = 1200 hours per year. If you wanted to add 1 hour of extra planning/grading time per day just add an additional 180-200 hours. You can divide whatever teacher pay (including or not including benefits) by these amounts to get an hourly rate.

FCPS teacher contracts are 7.5 hours per day. .5 hours of that is lunch time. The vast majority of teachers use lunch time to check email, reach out to parents, and to run lunch groups with kids.

You say that planning time is built into the school day. Here's the truth. In our elementary school, each teacher gets 1 hour of "planning time" per day. 1 out of 5 days a week, it is a mandatory Collaborative Learning Team meeting - a meeting with other teachers who teach your grade, plus special education teachers, other specialists, and administrators. So that leaves you 4 hours of planning a week. Now, that "planning time" also includes dropping off and picking up your students from another specialist -- so it may take 5-10 minutes in each direction to walk your whole class down to the gym and then go down and pick them up. So, let's say, generously, that you have 45 minutes a day to plan.

Each day, you teach blocks of 90 minutes of Language Arts, 60 minutes of Math, 45 minutes of Social Studies, 45 minutes of Science, and 30 minutes of Health. Then there is a remediation block where you are supposed to plan individualized activities for all of your students - extra help for kids who need remediation, enrichment for those who need enrichment. So, at the very least, you have to plan lessons and activities for 5 different subjects. Within Language Arts and Math, you are required to have rotations for different activities for groups at different levels. So, you're not just planning one lesson; you're planning a group lesson plus 4 additional activities.

Now, I've worked in professional fields other than teaching. And generally, when I had to do an hour-long presentation, I would take at least that long to plan for it. So, teachers are planning for 4 or 5 different blocks of instruction per day. By planning, I mean, designing the lesson, creating activities, creating SMART Board presentations or handouts, designing assessments, and making materials available online or making paper copies, locating and organizing manipulatives, etc. Do you really think any teacher can actually design quality instruction for 4 or 5 different subjects a day in just 45 minutes?!?!

On top of that, teachers are answering parent emails, returning parent calls, meeting with administrators, meeting to collaborate with specialists like a Reading Specialist and Technology Specialist, attending IEP meetings, creating spreadsheets of data, analyzing data, and, oh yeah, grading papers.

All that is supposed to happen during this planning time as well. Yeah, right.

When I taught high school, I my contract hours were up around 2:30. I stayed in the building until at least 6:30 every night, and I STILL took work home on nights and weekends. On average, I worked an additional 25 hours during the week and maybe 4-8 hours on the weekend, some weekends longer. That's IN ADDITION to the school day.

Every "vacation" - like winter break and spring break -- I'd work at least a 40 hour week grading projects and papers, planning units, and writing college recommendation letters for 80-100 kids. Summers, I'd go in early to get my classroom set up, take classes, and spend a lot of time reading and preparing for the next year (especially when you find out that all of a sudden you're teaching another grade or subject the next year and have to learn a whole new curriculum.)

Every job I have ever had in the private sector - including a technology company and on Capitol Hill - was significantly less stressful and less time consuming. Most professionals can take coffee breaks, bathroom breaks, and DCUM breaks whenever they want during the day. They can stop and talk to colleagues about work or your weekend or the news when you need a mental break. Teachers can't. When teachers need to take sick days, they have to spend hours writing lesson plans and creating activities for a person to do in their absence. None of that time is part of the built in "planning time" at school. There's no such thing as comp time or flex time.

I'm not complaining. I love my job. But I get furious when I hear people claim that we work 6.5 hour days and have all this time off. If FCPS teachers "worked to the rule" - that is, only worked their actual contract hours and did NO uncompensated work other than that - this entire system would grind to a complete halt. The school system DEPENDS on teachers planning and grading beyond contract hours and supervising clubs and extracurriculars and helping students after school and spending breaks and summers planning, preparing, and grading. So stop evaluating our compensation as if we were factory workers who got to leave when the whistle blows.

I'm not sure what to say about the planning time. MCPS has curriculum 2.0 so their teacher don't have to focus on what to teach and provide but many FCPS teachers want more control leading to the current ecart system and no textbooks. I've heard LCPS has a similar system. If you want a curriculum 2.0, lobby for it. Also in FCPS there is only ever Science or Social Studies taught each day and on one of those days the FLES teacher teaches during this time so the teacher only has to prepare four 45 minute lessons a week for science/social studies. Health is a shared teaching time with the guidance counselor although some of these lessons are taught by the teacher. It's only once every other week though. At most an elementary teacher is teaching lessons for about 4.5 hours out of the 7.5 hours they are contracted for (.5 hours opening and closing, 1.5 hours language arts, 1 hour math, 0.5 hours remediation/enrichment, 1 hour science/social studies/health).