Appointees working on school funding recommendations for Gov. Nathan Deal's Education Reform Commission have given preliminary approval to a fundamentally new way of reimbursing school districts for teacher pay.
The new funding formula would encourage districts to abandon the teacher pay scale in place for decades. Officials say existing teachers would be grandfathered under the existing state pay scale and that only new teachers would be affected. But they acknowledge that nearly all local school districts would not have to honor that commitment.
That’s because all but two of Georgia’s 180 districts have become, or have applied to become, “flexibility” systems. Charter systems and Strategic Waivers systems can ignore the state requirement to pay all teachers, including current teachers, on the pay scale.
So what are metro Atlanta districts’ plans regarding teacher pay and grandfathering existing teachers? None clearly committed to preserving the pay scale for current teachers. Here’s what Superintendent Luvenia Jackson of Clayton County Public Schools, which intends to become a strategic waivers system, says:
“We have had no discussion regarding whether current teachers would be grandfathered under any scenario in which the pay structure is amended in our district.”
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