Top teachers angry, upset at losing thousands a year

The General Assembly decided last month to eliminate pay supplements to Wilson and more than 2,000 other educators who have earned certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

National board-certified teachers have long received a 10 percent salary supplement, but that was cut in half last year. In the recently completed General Assembly session, lawmakers ended the supplement entirely.

The General Assembly’s decision amounts to a $6,000 to $8,000 hit for some of the state’s top teachers. And that’s not counting furloughs they, like most other educators must take.

“If I stayed in teaching, I would be making less next year than I was making 10 years ago,” Wilson said.

“It’s frustrating. For the state to say, ‘Well times are tough and this is what we have to do ... I decided, OK, I’ll just go teach for free in Africa.”

Nationally certified teachers across the state expressed such frustration as lawmakers wrote a recession-ravaged budget that included more than $500 million in cuts to basic school funding.

State school funding cuts have caused districts to propose new teacher layoffs, furloughs and pay cuts.

“There is no area of the budget that wasn’t cut,” said House Appropriations Chairman Ben Harbin (R-Evans).

But national board-certified teachers had been treated as special cases by lawmakers for years.

The veteran teachers spent hundreds of hours putting together portfolios of classroom work, videotaping classroom lectures and passing national assessments to earn the certification.

The process costs $2,500 — with at least some of the money often coming out of the teacher’s pocket – and the certificates are good for 10 years.

Leading lawmakers called them some of the state’s top teachers, and educators said they were promised the salary supplements for the life of their certificate.

But the recession forced lawmakers to cut deep into the budget. Over the course of two years, state spending went from about $21 billion to less than $18 billion.

Rep. Earl Ehrhart (R-Powder Springs), said money was only part of the problem.

Ehrhart has supported the supplements, but he said lawmakers couldn’t pay for the program this year because of a lawsuit filed by the state’s largest teacher organization, the Professional Association of Georgia Educators.

PAGE filed suit last year over the supplements, arguing that the state had no right to cut them in half.

That suit could go to court later this year.

Ehrhart blames the PAGE lawsuit for lawmakers’ decision to eliminate the final $7.2 million in funding for the supplements.

“I think the money would have gone in [the budget] if certain individuals in teacher organizations had not wanted to pursue a lawsuit against the state,” Ehrhart said. “We didn’t feel like we could appropriate it while we were being sued.”

Tim Callahan, spokesman for PAGE, said that is a bogus excuse lawmakers are using to defend eliminating the program because they didn’t want to commit the money.

“The educators in this state have zero trust in these guys and in their commitments and promises,” Callahan said. “That’s probably the worst impact of it all.”

Georgia isn’t the only state to cut the supplements. Jimmy Minichello, spokesman for the national board, said a stipend for national board teachers was eliminated in Ohio. Lawmakers in other states have tried unsuccessfully to kill supplements.

Charity Wang, a Hall County high school board-certified language arts teacher, said the cut will devastate the Georgia program. Fewer teachers will want to work toward certification now.

“The investment is too steep and the lack of recognition of its meaning too insulting for others to pursue it,” she said.

Wang’s husband is also nationally certified. They stand to lose $11,000 to $12,000 in supplements.

Sallie Barrett, a 25-year classroom veteran who teaches gifted life sciences at Gwinnett County’s Richard Hull Middle School, said she was “hurt, angry and disappointed” by the elimination of the supplement.

“Our legislators believed in the NBCTs once, but now they are turning their backs on recognizing quality teachers who have reached to perfect their skills,” she said.

Gail Tillery, literature teacher at North Forsyth High School, said she’s working three jobs to make up for the money she’s lost.

“If they [legislators] are going to do this to their most accomplished teachers, they are saying they do not value what we do,” she said. “I just feel demoralized. It’s like teachers are taking one blow after another.”

The issue is already getting mileage on the campaign trail.

Former Gov. Roy Barnes, who is running for another term, served as chairman of the national teaching board. He was the leading proponent in Georgia of giving out the 10 percent salary supplements to entice more teachers to go through the certification process.

Barnes is hammering state officials on the campaign trail for killing the supplements.

“It’s high time that the folks under the Gold Dome stop playing petty politics with our children’s futures,” he said.

Barnes, a lawyer and a Democrat, argues that the commitment is a kind of contractual obligation to the teachers. Ehrhart, the Republican lawmaker, says much the same thing.

And despite backing a budget that eliminates the supplements in the upcoming year, he supports bringing them back once the PAGE lawsuit is completed.

“I would advocate for it, no doubt,” he said. “They [the teachers] have earned it. It is as true an obligation as a teacher’s retirement [pension].”

That is small comfort to national board-certified educators like Ted Wansley, a physics teacher at Whitewater High School in Fayette County, who will lose more than $6,000 a year because of the cuts.

Wansley said his wife is postponing her retirement and he will likely work longer too. But he won’t continue putting in the extra hours and giving up vacation time for his job.

“I personally feel betrayed by the legislature when they withdrew funding for our stipends,” he said. “They have reneged on a contract that I took as a solemn promise.