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 Emily Lembeck of Marietta City Schools (a charter system) and the press office of the Cobb County School District (a strategic waivers system) say:
Marietta: “this plan is far from being implemented and there is still work to be done. However, as a charter system Marietta has been exploring alternative compensation strategies and this year grandfathered teachers into our more strategic way of paying doctoral level supplements. What we do in the future will depend on the funding stream and methodology, but we are continuing to determine how to best compensate teachers in a way that will also enable us to attract great teachers and retain our valued educators in a way that is financially sustainable.”
Cobb: Asked about it Friday, the school press office said Monday that executive cabinet members were wtill working on a response.
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