Pay for unused sick days, retirement bonuses, educator absences and other provisions tied to the district’s union contract cost Fort Wayne taxpayers big bucks in 2009-10 school year
EAG recently analyzed the collective bargaining agreement between Fort Wayne Community Schools and the Fort Wayne Education Association as part of our ongoing public awareness campaign on school spending in Indiana.
The result is a revealing look at how the FWEA’s union contract mandates spending on unused sick days, unnecessary retirement costs, automatic raises and a variety of other expenses that have little to no positive impact on student learning.
Consider this: Fort Wayne taxpayers spent nearly $25,000 last school year to subsidize the labor costs of the state’s multi-million dollar teachers union – the Indiana State Teachers Association. FWCS must pay its local union president’s benefits while he is on “release time” to work on union business, according to the union contract.
FWCS also spent roughly a quarter-million taxpayer dollars on automatic annual “step increases” for teachers based on a seniority pay scale that has no concrete correlation to student success. Both effective and ineffective Fort Wayne educators received the same automatic raise last year. Those automatic raises would have totaled $1.5 million if it wasn’t for dozens of teachers who left the district last year, school officials said.
Other estimated expenses in the 2009-10 school year tied to the union contract:
– FWCS spent $609,644.82 on professional conferences and travel expenses.
- FWCS paid retiring educators $91,297.14 for giving early notice of their intent to leave the district.
– FWCS paid teachers $103,841.84 for unused sick days.
– The average FWCS teacher was absent 6.8 percent of the contractual work year, compared to a student absentee rate of 4.55 percent.
– FWCS spent an estimated total of more than $7.5 million on teacher absences that consisted of about $5.2 million for personal or family illness, and nearly $800,000 for personal business leave.
– FWCS also spent more than $4 million on substitute teachers to cover the absences.
It quickly becomes obvious that by eliminating or modifying wasteful provisions included in the 2009-10 contract – such as retirement bonuses ($91,297), unnecessary attendance incentives ($103,841), union “release time” ($40,000), excessive leave allowances ($7.5 million), and automatic raises ($1.5 million) – much more money could be available for student programs and other, more effective, efforts to improve instruction.
This analysis is the second report in an ongoing effort to inform parents and taxpayers of the Hoosier state about how union collective bargaining agreements dictate spending, and waste scarce tax dollars, in individual school corporations. The first report, on the North Daviess Community Schools, is available at
www.PublicSchoolSpending.com.
Also on the website is a searchable database of teacher union contracts for more than 260 of Indiana’s 292 school corporations.
2 Comments
FWCS did NOT spend $7.5 million on teacher absences – that is salary money which is paid whether a teacher is absent or not. (Your bias is showing) Your 6.8% teacher absence rate – does that include professional leave days, which should not counted as absences? (this is how you counted teacher absences in the North Daviess analysis) You are aware, of course, that some professional leave time is dictated by the district? With 2000 teachers and a 180 day school year, a 6.8% teacher absence rate would have cost the district $2.6 million – something is off in your calculation or your information.
This year FWCS has 37 early retirees who will receive a bonus. Replacing a teacher at the top of the salary scale with a new teacher will save FWCS approximately $1.1 million in salary…money well spent !
And I will add, you are certainly aware that a student absence rate does NOT include days missed for suspension, college visits, court dates and working the polls, to name some days for which a student is not counted absent.