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 the press office for the Gwinnett County Public Schools, a strategic waivers system, says:
The office understands that “current teachers could be grandfathered in, but we would hope that the new pay structure would be attractive enough that veteran teachers would want to participate in it.”
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