About 15 percent of Teacher Retirement System pensioners are back working for local school systems, colleges or other government entities, according to a state audit released Friday.
Most of those 11,626 retirees are drawing a pension while working. Most are also working part-time, and about three-fourths work in local school systems, the State Department of Audits found.
The average re-employed retiree earned about $25,000 a year in salary in addition to $38,000 in retirement benefits in fiscal 2009, the audit showed. The highest-paid group was 21 school superintendents, who were making an average of $109,008 in salary, the report said.
Teachers have long been able to retire and come back to work part-time, and many do. But about a decade ago, during Gov. Roy Barnes’ administration, a push was made to allow them to come back full-time to help address teacher shortages and to work in low-performing schools.
Diane Santoianni retired after 30 years of teaching last year, but now she is back at Gwinnett County’s Brookwood High School, still teaching chemistry, only part-time.
She said five teachers in the school’s science department are retirees and says the school system gets a good deal: Retirees working as part-timers can teach six classes for what it costs to have one full-time teacher teaching five classes, she said.
“I make half the money in addition to my retirement, get to choose my schedule and it’s not so taxing,” Santoanni said.
The audit found that 73 percent of those who returned to work in school systems did so as classroom or substitute teachers. The average pay for returning classroom teachers was $32,684, according to the audit. Substitute teachers averaged $8,808 a year.
The school systems that used the most retirees were in metro Atlanta, led by Gwinnett County. The University of Georgia, the Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia State and Kennesaw State universities were also major employers of Teacher Retirement System retirees.
The TRS system includes University System retirees.
Jeffrey Ezell, executive director of the Teacher Retirement System, said with a few exceptions, coming back to work does not change a retiree’s pension.
Ezell said he’s not surprised so many TRS members are working at least part time.
“We have people who say, ‘I don’t like being retired. I thought I could fish every day or I thought I could play golf every day and I just can’t do it,’ ” Ezell said.
House Education Chairman Brooks Coleman, R-Duluth, a retired educator, has long been a supporter of bringing retirees back into the classroom.
“You are able to bring back your best,” Coleman said.
Coleman said the law has some safeguards. Teachers must wait a year after they retire to come back to work full-time. A principal can’t return to the same school, and a superintendent can’t return to the same system.
“That was to keep somebody from retiring, drawing the money and coming [right] back,” he said.
The teachers pension system is the state’s largest; the second-largest is the State Employees Retirement System. A similar report in December found that 6 percent of that system’s retirees had returned to work, earning pay with school systems, state agencies and as contractors, while receiving pensions.
Santoianni, the Brookwood chemistry teacher, said she likes the school — which is within walking distance of her home — her colleagues and the students.
“I feel I’m going to stay young as long as I stay with young people,” she said.
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