photo by: Rochelle Valverde/Journal-World

A committee of the Lawrence Education Association presents a report on teacher salaries to the school board as part of its meeting on Dec. 12, 2022, at district offices, 110 McDonald Dr.

A committee looking at how the Lawrence district’s teacher salaries compare to other school districts said that the district has been losing teachers in particular times in their careers due to the structure of the district’s pay schedule.

As part of its meeting Monday, the Lawrence school board received a report from a committee of the local teachers’ union, the Lawrence Education Association, that compared the salaries for teachers and other certified staff to those of other districts. Currently, the district’s salary matrix maxes out after 13 years of service, and committee members said there are other areas in the matrix where its structure has resulted in salaries falling significantly behind.

“(After 13 years of experience), our competitiveness with other districts in that presentation really started to kind of drop out from underneath us,” said Megan Epperson, interim vice president for the LEA. “So we saw other districts that were providing much more, in terms of thousands of dollars more, for those cells past 13 that our matrix was not providing.”

Epperson is part of the LEA subcommittee that has been reviewing the salary schedule. The report is a follow-up on a previous presentation about salaries in the district, in which board members were told the Lawrence salaries for experienced teachers were lagging behind some nearby districts. Epperson said after that initial review, which compared Lawrence to other districts in northeast Kansas and other districts in the state similar in budget or enrollment, the committee dove in deeper to look at the overall function of the salary matrix.

Under the district’s 2021-2022 salary schedule, someone with a bachelor’s degree receives a starting salary of $41,758 per year, someone with a master’s degree a starting salary of $44,408 per year, and someone with a doctorate a starting salary of $51,008 per year. The salary matrix includes incremental pay levels between those three levels of education, based on semester hours earned toward a higher degree, as well as pay increases for additional years of service. Currently the matrix maxes out after 13 years of service, at $49,633 per year for someone with a bachelor’s degree, $55,658 for someone with a master’s degree, and $65,808 for someone with a doctorate.

Teachers who have more than 13 years of experience in the district currently only receive a raise when the district and the union agree to make a general wage increase that affects the entire salary matrix. The contract agreed to by the union and district has not funded raises specifically for additional years of service for the past two years, so some teachers are two “steps” or cells behind the matrix.

Monday’s report went into details about where else in the matrix the district was falling behind. Apart from the pay schedule maxing out after the 13th year of service, there are other points in a teacher’s career where Lawrence’s pay is not competitive with the other districts the committee reviewed.

Committee member Matt Ellis said a key issue is that the pay matrix is not “equalized,” meaning that the horizontal steps (raises for additional years of education) and vertical steps (raises for additional years of experience) are irregular rather than being of equal monetary value as you move across and down the matrix. The matrix is the result of raises that have been approved as part of contract negotiations over the years, and Ellis said that has resulted in the value of steps being inconsistent.

“What I was trying to show in this picture, is that as we move across the matrix, there are some inconsistencies,” said Ellis, who used a color-coding system to try to illustrate those inconsistencies. “We have some columns that are orange, that are saying that those are pretty low steps, verses some columns that are green, those are pretty big steps.”

photo by: USD 497

A presentation slide shows the district’s teacher salary matrix for the 2021-2022 school year.

For example, that irregularity means that under the current matrix, teachers receive different raises for earning their master’s degree depending on when in their career they complete the degree. Ellis said that difference was random as opposed to intentional. The committee members said a lot of other districts they reviewed for the comparison had equalized matrices, and the irregularity in the district’s pay matrix meant there were periods in a teachers career where they could make significantly more — $5,000 to $10,000 more annually — at those districts.

The school district saw a significant amount of resignations last school year, and school board member Kay Emerson asked the committee if it had reviewed when in their career teachers had left. Committee members said they looked at resignations over the past five years, and that there were a couple of “hot spots,” including the first few years of service as well as an area in the center of the matrix where irregularities in the step value cause pay to lag.

The report compares Lawrence public school salaries to six other districts: Manhattan, Maize, Topeka, Kansas City (Kansas), Olathe, and Shawnee Mission. For example, compared to Lawrence’s starting salary of $41,758 for someone with a bachelor’s degree, Manhattan pays $42,200, Maize pays $44,100, Topeka pays $45,500, Kansas City pays $44,384, Olathe pays $43,286, and Shawnee Mission pays $43,779. Additional comparisons are made across levels in the salary schedules.

The committee presented several proposals with different formats for additional “vertical” steps for experience as well proposals that combined those additions with an equalized matrix, meaning every step down or across the table provides a raise of the same the value. The example used $1,000, but Ellis said that amount could be adjusted, and could also be phased in over two or three years.

As far as next steps, Epperson said the union’s negotiations team will be reviewing the topic again in January. She said when the team determines what formatting changes to the matrix and what other changes, such as raises for additional education and years of service, it wanted to pursue, then the committee could provide an estimate for what the proposal would cost.

Board member Kelly Jones, who represents the board in contract negotiations, said she really appreciated the time the committee put into the review and information it yielded.

“This is a great tool for the board and I look forward to seeing what we can do with this information,” Jones said. “And I really appreciated you mentioning that this doesn’t have to be done overnight, that we might look at what does this look like from a phased approach that makes it more palatable for a board that’s on a pretty tight budget.”