Michigan teacher contract analysis reveals ‘black hole’ of school spending
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Before there’s any more talk about raising taxes to support public schools in Michigan, we thought the taxpayers of the state should know a few things about the costs attached to union teachers’ collective bargaining agreements.
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So we spent the past few weeks studying 25 contracts from different districts, using schools of various size and geographic location. The result of our effort is the enclosed report, “Michigan Teacher Contracts: The Black Hole of School Spending.”
Our report is by no means scientific in nature. We simply scoured teacher contracts for examples of stipulations that cost school districts a great deal of money. We believe we found many types of contract-mandated expenses that schools could easily live without, particularly in the current economic climate.
This report focuses partially on the existence of “step” salary increases for teachers in virtually every Michigan school district. While teachers union officials like to tell the media that they haven’t had a raise in years, nothing could be further from the truth.
Teachers typically receive automatic, annual raises for the first 10 or 11 years of employment, just for showing up and remaining on the payroll. And the raises get bigger as teachers advance through their graduate and post-graduate work.
In most districts a first-year teacher makes about $34,000, and after 10 or 11 years makes about $55,000. These annual increases are hard on school budgets. In the Kalamazoo district, for instance, step raises are expected to increase the district’s payroll by about $1 million next year.
Our study also looks at the practice of “release time” for union members. We learned that several districts around the state pay the local union presidents a full salary, plus benefits, even though they don’t teach at all.
In the Rochester district, for example, the non-teaching union president draws a salary of about $84,000 per year, and a total compensation package of about $120,000, courtesy of the taxpayer.
The study also addresses paid sick and personal days for teachers, as well as compensation for unused personal days.
In Escanaba, for instance, teachers get 15 paid sick days and four paid personal days per year. In the 2008-09 school years, they used 1,257 sick days and 529 personal days, which cost the district approximately $136,000 for substitute teacher fees.
The Rochester district gives teachers as many as seven paid days off for accumulation of unused sick days. At the end of the 2008-09 school years, the district owed various teachers a total of $732,032.
Our study exposes the practice of paying teachers extra money if they have more than the negotiated number of children in their classrooms. In Midland, the district paid out $280,412 for student “overages.”
The report does not discuss the cost of school employee health insurance, or the cost of union labor performing school support services. We’ll take a close look at those topics later this year.
“Before our state lawmakers go back to the tax well once again, they really need to take a look at all the waste that takes place at the school district level, largely due to language in union teachers contracts,” said Kyle Olson, vice president of EAGF.
“If every school district was allowed to eliminate the wasteful spending that’s stipulated in union contracts, we believe enough money could be freed up to help schools survive the current funding crisis.”
Additionally, EAGF announces a contest to encourage taxpayers to review their own district’s contract and find more outrageous and odd expenses. Contracts can be found at the Mackinac Center’s website.
Please submit entries to info@edactiongroup.org. The deadline for submissions is 5:00 p.m. Friday, February 26th.
The top three entries will win great prizes, with an iPod Nano for first place. Winners will be announced in the March 2nd EAG Insider, our weekly electronic newsletter.
“We hope this report will start a chain reaction of scrutiny of these contracts that are a huge financial drain on school coffers,” Olson said.
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