EPISD teacher pay raises

February 2, 2017

The other day we had a conversation with an EPISD employee who works in a school, not the central office.

She indicated that her personal opinion was that the “teaching staff” should get a 10% pay raise.

Not possible

School finance in Texas is very complicated.

From a local property tax perspective school districts are allowed to set two tax rates, one for operations and maintenance (O&M) and the other for debt service (interest and sinking fund).

EPISD essentially cannot set an O&M property tax rate above $1.17 per hundred dollars of property valuation.

EPISD has currently set their O&M rate at $1.07.  At that rate their 2016-2017 budget anticipates bringing in $165,104,344 from the O&M portion.  Raising the rate to the maximum of $1.17  would bring in another $15.4 million dollars.

Cost of raises

The district has approximately 4,000 teachers.  The starting salary for a first year teacher is $44,900.  We don’t know what the average salary is so we will do our computing using the lowest (least paid) pay rate.

A 10% increase would amount to $4,490 per teacher.  The cost to the district would increase by more than that because of benefits, but we will leave that out of our cost computation.  The raise of $4,490 multiplied by 4,000 teachers comes to $17.96 million dollars.

The district could only raise another $15.4 million in local property taxes and that would take facing a roll back election from the voters.

The district simply cannot raise taxes high enough to pay for  a 10% teacher raise unless they cut costs elsewhere.

Declining enrollment

In this article last year the Times delivered more bad news for the teachers:

Trustees said the 1.5 percent raises were all the district could afford now, as student enrollment declines.

School districts receive state funding based on attendance, so fewer students means fewer dollars.

Unless the district cuts their other costs don’t look for big pay raises for the teachers.

We have a basic marketing question here.

Will parents choose to send their children to EPISD schools because of shiny new buildings or because of the quality of education offered?

We deserve better

Brutus

 

13 Comments | El Paso Independent School District, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

EPISD bonds–plans to handle closed schools

January 29, 2017

Elpasotaxguardians published this post about EPISD’s lack of a plan to dispose of the schools they want to close.

Others think that they do have a plan but don’t want the public to know about it.

Its good to see other local blogs looking into the issue.

We deserve better

Brutus

2 Comments | El Paso Independent School District | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

Rubber stamp? or stamped out?

January 24, 2017

The EPISD board promised us that there would be a citizen based bond advisory board to oversee the spending of the bond funds.

The district board recently approved the bond advisory board’s charter.  You can download it here :  episdbondadvisoryboard39936866

Neutered before they began

The group has been named the Citizens’ Bond Advisory Committee (CBAC).

The superintendent is evidently too busy to deal with the CBAC so he has delegated the “Deputy of Finance and Operations (DFO)” to deal with the group.

From the charter:

The Trustees retain sole authority to disband the CBAC.

…the Chair shall consult with the DFO to establish a meeting schedule for the CBAC

The Chair shall consult with the DFO to establish agendas for each CBAC meeting.

Coordinate with the DFO to visit District facilities and grounds …

The DFO, through the Superintendent’s Board of Trustees Weekly Update process, shall provide periodic status reports on the CBAC’s work.

Any reports prepared by the CBAC shall be provided to the Superintendent.

So the CBAC will meet when the DFO says so, shall consider items that the DFO approves, get the DFO’s permission to visit projects, report to the school board through the DFO, and run reports through the Superintendent.

Who is this DFO?

None other than our former city chief financial officer.

We deserve better

Brutus

4 Comments | City government, El Paso Independent School District | Permalink
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Basic arithmetic

January 20, 2017

The Times recently reported that the EPISD superintendent was just given a $45,000 pay hike, “raising his salary to $303,000”.

Different story

The Texas Education Agency lists his base pay at $298,843 for 2015-2016.

Does that mean that today’s real number is somewhere around $350,000?

Don’t believe what you read

As it turns out the January 18, 2017 article in the Times was wrong.  The superintendent’s salary was already at $303,000.  A subsequent article in the Times used correct numbers without telling us whether it was the EPISD board president or the Times reporter who had made the mistake.

Then again maybe it was part of the Times editorial policy and not a mistake but a deliberate act.

As a reader pointed out yesterday, the superintendent also gets a $1,200 a month phone allowance.  Some are more equal than others was a post that detailed other benefits in his first contract, some of which should get your attention.

No public input

The review of the superintendent’s performance was performed in closed session in a special meeting of the board that was held during working hours.  Holding it at that time made it difficult for teachers or members of the public to attend.

The pay raise was subsequently approved in open session without any details.

We deserve better

Brutus

8 Comments | El Paso Independent School District, State Government | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

EPISD goal setting

January 19, 2017

Isn’t it sad that the goals the EPISD board evidently set for the superintendent they hired in 2013 were a “balanced budget, finances and last fall’s passage of the $668.7 million bond issue”?

Many of us might have hoped that the school board would have given the superintendent the goal of improving the education of our children.

The school board president now tells us that “the district will be ‘laser-focused’ on students to improve scores, increase enrollment in college, the military or vocational certification and making sure that students are literate in two or more languages”.

Defining the term

Traditional dictionaries like Websters don’t seem to have gotten around to defining “laser-focused” so we rely here on urbandictionary.com.  According to them the term means:

Intensely paying attention to a single object, concept, person, or activity to the exclusion of everything else.

Which is it?

So now which way will it be?  Will the district finally ask the superintendent to pay attention to the education of our children or will he be asked to spend our bond funds the way the moneyed interests want the money spent?

We deserve better

Brutus

20 Comments | El Paso Independent School District | Permalink
Posted by Brutus

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