Special to the Mirror by Northampton County School Board Member Randall Parks
Recently an article was published in the Mirror concerning teacher retention which generated many responses from the citizens of Northampton County. It was indeed refreshing to see the interest and passion demonstrated by our citizens. Unfortunately, many of the responses demonstrated a lack of information and knowledge which bedevils those of us who are intimately involved in establishing and carrying out the policies and programs in our system.
As stated in the article salaries are indeed a large reason for teachers leaving our system to move to a more lucrative position. I know this fact first hand as my daughter taught at Northampton for several years and left for a $10,000 raise in Norfolk. Our HR representative attends job fairs in which the school districts on either side of her offer salaries from seven to ten thousand more as a beginning salary and even more for administrators. Many times our notifications for openings as teachers or administrators are either unanswered or answered by only one or two applicants. Many of our hires are those applicants who were unable to secure jobs in better paying areas and as a last resort took a job in our system until they were able to get a position anywhere else. With such a differential in salaries we are “behind the proverbial eight ball” with nothing we can do to change this fact. After the change to an elected school board, we the newly elected school board, desperately wanted to give a raise to the teachers who had not had a step raise for several years. Each of the three years we have been on the board through some creative budgeting by our finance department and our superintendent, we have been able to give a step raise to our teachers. Unfortunately, we are still well behind the other school divisions in our region as we are the lowest paying one. You must be asking yourself why this fact is true. Since 2009 the state of Virginia has lowered its commitment to public education from 36% of the state budget to 29%. This decrease has cost our system almost a million dollars a year which in the case of smaller systems such as ours has proved well, nothing short of catastrophic. In addition, and perhaps even more important is the method used by the state to determine those monies distributed to each school division. The formula used is called the composite index and according to this formula Northampton County is richer than Accomac County, Virginia Beach, Newport News, Gloucester, Harrisonburg (home of James Madison University), Lexington (home of VMI and Washington and Lee University) as well as many other localities in Virginia, thereby resulting in less money per student than those “poorer” systems. This “fact” is surreal to those of us entrusted in providing the best education we can for our children. Anyone with half a brain can see how ludicrous this situation is and wonder how can the composite index be so wrong and worse yet continues to be used in its present form to literally cheat our children out of the education they deserve. [Read more…]