Reply to Petition to DC Council for FY 2024 Charter School Budgets

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Reply to "Petition to DC Council for FY 2024 Charter School Budgets"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yeah I don’t think so. Tell your charter board to increase teacher salaries if you don’t like current pay structures. Charter teachers should unionize if they want the collective bargaining power that the WTU has. Why on earth should they benefit from the DCPS union’s efforts if they choose not to unionize (MV aside)?

Some context for anyone who’s trying to figure out what this is about: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1109459.page

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This is silly. Salaries can't be increased independent of funding. The salaries of the unionized charter school are lower than the other charters. It isn't that the union isn't effective, they just can't raise salaries to compete with other charters (or DCPS) without getting equivalent funding. [/quote]

Charters can make changes to their payscale and salaries if they want to. They get to manage their own budgets. If they wanted to cut back on something else, they could afford more in salaries. Some schools have costly buildings. Some have more aides, some have less. Some have smaller class size, some larger. Then there's salaries for their leadership, and how much they pay to consultants and charter management organizations.

At our school (ITDS), there are way more aides than DCPS provides for its schools. In DCPS, for example, there would not typically be a full-time aide in an upper elementary classroom unless it were PTO-funded or required by a student's IEP. DCPS aims for class sizes of 22-24ish for elementary, but will go higher on a case by case basis-- I've personally seen elementary classes as high as 29 kids. ITDS caps class size at 24, occasionally 25. If ITDS school went up to 25 in all classrooms, it would have $100K in formula funding. It's the school's choice to make. But it seems perfectly right and fair for a school with more students to get more funding.[/quote]

You can't truly believe that schools can make whatever changes they want to their payscales regardless of the level of funding that they receive?? The ITDS instructional salaries budget is $5 million dollars. An additional 100k is a 2% raise for the instructional staff and that's assuming that none of the 100k from raising class sizes has to be used to accommodate the additional students -- you know, like for food services, supplies, materials, etc.  The teachers at your school are getting shorted and so are the kids. But yes, a charter school can cut aides, paras, field trips, curriculum etc. and possibly have a little more. However, it won't even come close to the amount that is being provided to DCPS outside of the traditional funding mechanism.[/quote]

Oh please. The teachers at ITDS are in no way mistreated and neither are the kids. Raising class sizes to a level that is entirely normal and acceptable to DCPS (25 kids in elementary) would bring in 10 kids in 1st-5th. More middle school admits, if anyone wants the spots, could bring in another 6 kids (grades 6-8). So that's about $160k, maybe $100 of that can be used for salaries. Then if you take out the elementary and middle school aides (about $50K per year payroll cost), that's one per grade level so 8 people, or $400,000. So there's half a million dollars, just by doing things that are normal in DCPS. Of the 30 or 35 teachers ITDS has, each could have at least a $10,000 raise from this.

If ITDS teachers had the same challenges DCPS does, in terms of big class sizes, mid-year admits, more at-risk kids, being the school of right for shelters and newly arrived kids who speak no English, including kids from self-contained classrooms, all those kinds of things, then they absolutely should get paid more. But as it currently is, 24 mostly non-ar-risk kids with high retention and no backfilling, plus a full-time aide, just isn't an especially difficult job. If that's too hard for someone then they aren't cut out to teach in DC.[/quote]

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