Despite an increase in education funding, the state’s teacher compensation targets could still pose some challenges for Oregon-Davis Schools. State Representative Jim Pressel touted Indiana’s $1.9 billion school funding increase during last month’s school board meeting. “That’s huge, so 50 percent of the whole state’s budget of $37 billion,” Pressel says. “It’s about $9 billion a year, and if I did my math right, Oregon-Davis should receive about $700 per child more in the ADM count.”
But the General Assembly’s target for schools to allocate 45 percent of their tuition support money to the classroom could leave out a number of staff members who also have an impact on students’ learning and development, according to Superintendent Bill Bennett. “So that leaves out employee groups like media specialists, librarians, school counselors – which we talked at the beginning of the meeting about the importance of social/emotional learning and those types of things,” Bennett says. “It leaves out our speech pathologist, school psychologist, et cetera, because they do not work with, basically, a classroom for 50 percent of the day, which really narrows the number of people included in our 45 percent rule.”
Teachers’ benefits aren’t considered part of schools’ classroom allocation, either, and Pressel doesn’t expect the General Assembly to change that. “If we were to put that all into and say that you can make this 45 percent, the goal of getting those dollars to the classroom would not even get close to being met,” Pressel said. “And then everybody would be coming back to the General Assembly going, ‘Hey, you screwed us over again. We need more money. We need more money. We need more money.’”
While Superintendent Bennett welcomed the push to increase the starting teacher salary to $40,000, he felt the bigger challenge is keeping more experienced teachers who are ready for more pay. Pressel was open to the idea of exploring a sliding scale for smaller schools’ graduation rate, after High School Principal B.J. Awald noted that one or two students could mean a big difference to the school’s graduation percentage.
