Mehlville School District Budget Cuts

Last week, many of our high school teachers had a meeting with the superintendent of the Mehlville School District, Mr. Terry Noble, in an attempt to help our teachers understand why we once again had a frozen pay scale. I say "again" because in the last 10 years pay has been frozen multiple times, and teachers have lost their yearly step sometimes more than one in a given year. This "step" is a small pay increase intended to recognize years of service and help with cost of living. Interestingly, several of our teachers spoke out about how it could be possible to be a teacher in the district for 29 to 30 years and never reach the end of the step schedule (about 16 - 17 years depending upon how the board decides to mess with our salary schedule for that year). This should have put these teachers at what is called a longevity step L1 or L2 and would include a 500 dollar pay increase every year. Mr. Noble was surprised to find out that since these teachers had lost a total of 9 years in steps and pay, that they had yet to reach longevity. One of our teachers mentioned she's have to probably work until she died to reach longevity in this school district. We'll see what the fall-out is from this. I hope we can trust Mr. Noble to do something about this unfair practice of messing with our years of service on our pay scale.

We are all bothered that when the time came to cut budgets, cuts were first made to academic programs like tutoring and textbooks, as well as freezing teacher salaries. I asked why we don't cut freshman sports and other non-academic programs, as well as transportation since we clearly cannot afford to transport kids, especially since the price of gas has gone through the roof. In my opinion, cutting academics first is a terrible policy, and I'm still trying to understand why it is better to have little Johnny have his freshman football paid for instead of a great teacher and a new textbook, along with the tutoring he'll need to be successful in school. The response is somewhat understandable, given the history (or histrionics) of the past actions of our school district. The idea is that the district threatened to remove busing and multiple programs several years ago, and then stupidly reinstated them. Now the community doesn't trust us when we say we are out of money, and this time we are truly in a budget crisis. This threat and don't deliver angered the community, and so the idea now is to not do anything to anger the community, like taking away things to balance the budget. So instead, the district has decided to anger the teachers and lower moral by freezing salaries. I guess we are viewing this as the lesser of two evils? The cuts are actually things that the public really doesn't see. They don't see that I'm teaching with a book that is so old, that I have to write extra material to have my students be able to learn how to understand and work in the field of biotechnology (pretty common now, not 15 years ago). They don't see my cabinets falling apart, and the student desk tops cracking and not being replaced year after year. They don't see my room so full at the start of the year that I literally have no place to sit students. According to the state, my room size is inadequate for doing labs, and this applies to most of our science rooms. They don't see our teachers struggling to make bills and having to take second jobs to do so. They don't see the mass exodus of teachers who are just tired of waiting for a decent raise. But they do come for football games, and they do rely on busses to get their kids to school. Still, it's hard to continue to see the district balancing the budget on the backs of its teachers once again.
This is the only district I've known that bases it's future teacher pay on how many teachers are retiring. It is an ignorant practice, since you cannot predict how many teachers in any given year will retire, and therefore have no idea how you are going to continue to give your professional staff even small cost of living increases to keep them happy and on the job. Hopefully Mr. Noble will work with Mr. Bell to find a more acceptable method of funding our salaries. He seemed very concerned about this and I hope this also changes soon.
I'd love to hear from you as to what you think of this and in particular, what you think the district should cut back on to balance it's budget at this time. It's really important for our community to decide where these cuts will come from in the future, as we will be going for a ballot initiative in November to extend the debt on our district bonds, and free up money for salaries, textbook and tutoring for the next year. If this doesn't happen, and other ballot initiatives don't pass, then get ready for huge cuts. Please leave a comment with your ideas. This helps me when I meet with people in the NEA and CO. Thanks!