As the Menlo Park City School District comes up with a philosophy for how to pay its teachers, there is concern that introducing teacher evaluations into a document about teacher pay could make instructors anxious, while other district employees feel left out of the conversation.

The district began studying the issue of teacher retention after it found through a survey that 34 percent of teachers and staff who left the district at the end of the 2017-18 school year did so because of long commutes and high cost of living.

The district's school board held a panel discussion and study session with teachers on Tuesday, Nov. 6, about establishing a “compensation philosophy" for teachers. The school board will discuss the philosophy again at its meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 13.

The philosophy could be the start of showing the public there's a return on investment for paying teachers more, said school board Vice President David Ackerman on Nov. 6. Residents may have to pay more taxes to hire the best teachers and pay them more, he said.

“For the first time, the superintendent will be out there selling the idea that we need to pay teachers more,” he said. “If we raise our salaries, we will be cornering the market for the best and brightest talent.” This could cause nearby districts to also pay teachers more, he said.

Other board members were “uncomfortable” with discussion about raising teachers' salaries just to retain them.

“It felt like it was more than that for me,” board member Caroline Lucas said at the meeting, adding that teacher pay shouldn’t be raised just to keep teachers from leaving the district. Lucas also teaches Spanish at La Entrada Middle School in Menlo Park, a part of the Las Lomitas School District.

The compensation philosophy is a starting point for conversations and analyses for a vision of what it would look like to pay teachers if the district were fully funded, school board President Terry Thygesen said at the meeting.

The district could give teachers a 20 percent raise, but it doesn’t have the money to sustain that for more than a year, Ackerman said.

Since 88 percent of annual district spending is on salaries and benefits, having a clearly stated and agreed-upon compensation philosophy to guide hiring and staffing also makes fiduciary sense, Parke Treadway, the district’s public information officer, wrote in an email. The average teacher salary in the district is $110,000, she said.

The district employs 220 full-time certified teachers and 116 full-time classified employees.

"Second to the teachers”

Jarrod Coombes, president of the district’s chapter of the California School Employees Association, told the board that classified staff will oppose the philosophy if staffers aren't included in the document. Support staff is made to feel like an afterthought with the document since it focuses on teachers, he said.

“We feel the document is myopic and quite frankly insulting,” said Coombes, who is a network/systems administrator for the district, at the Nov. 6 meeting. “We are the people who drive the kids to school, run the technology ... that help teachers teach in classrooms, manage registration process -- we even write the paychecks part of the philosophy.”

After the meeting, Coombes said he had “no idea” why classified staff wasn’t included in the draft philosophy. He became aware of the philosophy after a previous board meeting.

“It’s a compensation philosophy they’re writing that only includes two-thirds of people they compensate,” he said the next day. “It’s somewhat insulting. It basically says teachers are the be-all and end-all of what goes on here (in district schools) ... The board and the district has had a history of making us feel second to the teachers; it’s part of a bigger pattern.”

In an email, Superintendent Erik Burmeister wrote that the compensation philosophy "is not intended to address philosophical approaches to classified or unrepresented employee compensation; although, the board could begin such an effort in the future."

"The board appreciates the input of the classified union and will consider their input as it will the feedback of other groups and individuals," Burmeister said.

Concerns about teacher evaluations

Some teachers at the meeting were concerned about a section of the proposed philosophy that establishes a “robust continuous improvement and evaluation system to support the individual and collective talents of the members of the organization.”

Vincent Lopez, a Menlo Park Education Association negotiator and third grade teacher at Oak Knoll School, said at the meeting that establishing a new evaluation system is “always touchy for teachers."

“I read this as tying an evaluation to compensation,” he added.

Redefining what it means to be a satisfactory teacher will help the public understand why the district should change teacher pay, Ackerman explained.

Lucas agreed that the district needs to be able to tell taxpayers “this isn’t the status quo.” The district has to be clear it’s demanding more from teachers so it can ask for more from taxpayers, she said.

“I think for a lot of outstanding teachers this (new evaluation system) is not going to be a huge change,” she said.

A draft of the compensation philosophy can be found here.

The school board plans to vote on a final draft of the compensation philosophy in January.

Tuesday's board meeting will get underway at 6 p.m. at the TERC Building at 181 Encinal Ave. in Atherton.

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