Cuts hit Fayette teachers hardest

By Nancy Badertscher

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Teacher salaries are being cut across Georgia, but none more dramatically than in Fayette County, one of the state’s wealthiest counties with one of its finest public school systems.

With the three unpaid furlough days ordered this summer and an across-the-board pay cut imposed last February, Fayette County teachers — who already were among the lowest-paid in metro Atlanta — face a 6.1 percent salary reduction this year.

“We get kicked in the teeth twice,” Diane Basham, an economics teacher at the county’s McIntosh High School, said of the furloughs and 4.5 percent pay cut. “I fear what will happen next.”

Helping to stoke the anxiety: Employees recently were told that the insurance benefits they fought to keep last year could be back on the table, if the state orders more furloughs or deeper budget cuts late this year or early next year.

Employees thought the benefits cut was averted by the 4.5 percent pay cut, which starts coming out of their paychecks on Wednesday.

“A school district’s most valuable asset is not its buildings, its buses or its programs. It is its employees,” said Joseph Jarrell, a world history teacher at McIntosh High and the head of the local chapter of the Professional Association of Georgia Educators. “It appears that Fayette County has forgotten this.”

Some residents who were first attracted to Fayette largely because of the reputation of its schools are upset.

“There’s concern this is going to drive a lot of good teachers out of Fayette County, which has so long boasted how great our education system is,” said Cele Eifert, a mother of two and president of the McIntosh Parent- Teacher-and-Student Organization.

Fayette school Superintendent John DeCotis said the priority has been to preserve programs the community has come to expect — “a lot of extra things that other systems don’t have” and that cost more.

Among them: paraprofessionals in every kindergarten, first grade, arts and vocation class and the adoption every year of new textbooks, which some school systems are foregoing to save money, DeCotis said.

Will the cuts to teacher pay and other spending affect the school system’s performance? “We’ll see at the end of this year,” the superintendent said. “We’re running as fast as we can and working as hard as we can not to let it slip.”

Fayette schools — and its teachers — routinely receive state and national accolades for student achievement. For example, two of its schools — Starr’s Mill and McIntosh high schools — made this year’s “Top of the Class” list of the nation’s 1,500 best high schools published annually by Newsweek magazine.

The county’s average SAT score of 1,555 this year was 95 points above the state average, and 46 points over the national average. It’s also the only metro Atlanta school system able to boast that all its schools have made adequate yearly progress every year since the the Federal No Child Left Behind Act took effect.

Pain for teachers

Eifert, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, understands the economic realities. Her husband is one of the many Delta Air Lines pilots who live in Fayette County and who have taken sizable pay cuts to keep the airline flying.

Still, she’s adamant that Fayette teachers are underpaid for the important jobs they do and that their salaries should not have been touched.

“A lot of people in the community — even with the personal cuts that people have to deal with — think it’s a travesty that teachers have to go through this,” said Eifert, whose family moved to the county in 1998.

Cut the superintendent’s salary, travel and other expenses, she said.

“But don’t ever touch the teachers,” Eifert said. “It’s like in the military saying: ‘We’re going to cut the front line soldiers’ pay, but we still want you to have good morale and fight for us.’ ”

Jarrell said a benefits cut of the size last proposed would be equivalent to about a 3 percent pay reduction for teachers, pushing the total of all the cuts to 9 percent.

“Furthermore, if we receive additional furlough days, this could result in an additional 1.6 percent pay cut for teachers,” he said. “Teachers fear they face a total pay reduction that may reach 11 percent.”

School system officials are saying the benefits cut — technically a reduction or cut in the cost that the school system picks up on the employees’ behalf — is only one of several potential options. A recent post on the system’s Web site says: “The Board of Education’s priorities are to avoid further reducing employee pay and to not reduce benefit supplements paid by the school system.”

Jarrell, who has been teaching 30 years, said the pay cut and furlough days will cost him $4,400 this year.

He’s gone through the family budget to make the necessary adjustments. The family van that’s 10 years old and would normally be replaced now will have to keep rolling another year.

The vacation fund’s been pared down, and other discretionary spending has had close review, Jarrell said.

“A district has to do the same thing,” he said.

“We feel betrayed”

Dana Camp, who has taught science for 22 years and is head of the local chapter of the Georgia Association of Educators, said the salary cut will negatively affect how retirement is calculated for her and other longtime teachers.

“Have I thought about leaving this district, and I live here? Yes,” she said, noting that she could make about $4,600 more a year in neighboring Clayton County.

“That’s what teachers and employees are asking: Can they afford to continue to work in this school district?” Camp said.

When the benefits cut was last discussed, Camp and GAE did a survey and found that employees preferred to have their pay reduced, she said.

David Gardner, who retired from a career in financial management and drives a bus for the school system, opposed the move to reduce benefits for employees.

“Most of the bus drivers are very low-income, so this was huge for them,” he said. “They are hand-to-mouth on their paycheck, and it’s the only insurance they have.”

Heather Allen, a physical education teacher and coach at Fayette’s Whitewater High School, said, “Everybody understands the budget crisis coming down from the state.

“But what we don’t understand is why do teachers and others who have a direct impact on students have to take the cuts?” she said.

“It’s really disheartening, and sooner or later it’s going to affect the students,” she said, adding that her coaching supplement is said to also be on the line.

Basham, the economics teacher at McIntosh, said teachers “take our jobs seriously, and the last thing we want to do is hurt the kids. But my own personal feelings — I think morale-wise we feel betrayed,” she said.

Officials with three education associations said the teacher salary cuts in Fayette are the biggest they know of in the state.

Figures compiled last year showed Fayette County teachers’ salaries were below average for metro Atlanta. For example, a teacher from Fayette with a bachelor’s degree was making $47,248 — $1,235 less than his or her counterpart in eight other suburban counties.

Benefits, at that time, put them on par with other counties, Jarrell said. “But that was before the 4.5 percent cut,” he said.

Like the state, school systems across Georgia have seen tax revenues dip and their budgets, staff and spending pared back.

A dwindling reserve

Fayette schools — like a majority of Georgia’s 179 other public school systems — were in no position to absorb the cost of the three furlough days ordered by the governor.

The school system has one of the smallest reserve funds in the state — something that concerns teachers and parents.

“You would expect a county that’s very high-level in both income and performance of the school district would not be broke,” said Camp, who teaches at Fayette County High School. “But we are broke. It’s like we [the school system] are living paycheck to paycheck.”

The $1.7 million that the school system had in reserves on June 30, 2008, was less than 1 percent of the school system’s annual budget and far from the 12 percent ideal, said Laura Brock, the school system’s comptroller.

“The state austerity cuts started in 2002, and that’s when it [the reserve fund] started really declining,” Brock said.

The school system’s financial conditions have been up and down, like a “roller coaster,” she said. “It has been extremely stressful for the last 12 months.”

The system’s revenues fell $3.8 million short of projections in fiscal 2008, Brock said.

“We had the money spent by the time we knew it wasn’t coming in, and that lowers your fund balance,” DeCotis said.