No teacher pay raises proposed for the Fort Smith Public School District

With declines in state and federal funding and additions to district expenses, Fort Smith Public School District officials are suggesting that teacher pay salary schedule stay the same for the 2024-25 school year, leaving the only pay raises coming from steps up in the schedule.

The school finance update presented Monday (Feb. 26) by FSPS Chief Financial Officer Charles Warren to the FSPS Board of Education showed that on average certified staff will earn about 0.73% or $446 a year more in the next school year than they make this year. The lowest amount of salary increase will be $0 and the highest amount will be $675 annually or 1.33%.

The district also is planning to keep the classified salary schedule exactly the same as last year. The impact will be that the lowest salary increase will be $0 and the highest will be $1,080 a year (2.05%), which will only include a very few number of IT employees. The average salary increase will be $262 annually (0.9%).

“We are about to enter into our second year under the Learns Act. We know in this year, we were given information as well as obligations to raise base salaries and given funds from the state to make sure we were able to do that,” Warren said. “What we have to ask ourselves is, do we feel confident that the legislature will continue to fund this level of funding for our teacher salary schedules? We believe that should happen, but as with any type of legislation, you have to watch to make certain it is being earmarked and released.”

Other funding models for schools have been suggested in the legislature, Warren said. Those models, which are being discussed, could reduce the district’s state funding in the future.

“It’s murky at best,” he said.

On the bright side, FSPS millage revenue will stay the same for future years, and the district has a 3.8% growth in assessment for the coming school year.

“Millage is steady and assessment did grow again. It is not as strong as we have seen in the last few years, but it is a growth that we believe will be sustainable,” Warren said.

State foundation funding also increases for the coming school year at 2.01%, but down from the 2.77% last year. Still, foundation funding has had steady growth of at least 2% every year for the past several years, he said.

“We don’t feel comfortable knowing that is a sustainable figure anymore. We have always based upon the knowledge that we would always have at least that growth. It may not grow even 1% more, but we would know that the growth of the year before would be available to us in future years,” Warren said. “It would be remarkable for us to believe they would lower the foundation funding rate that is available each school year. Unfortunately, the change in the funding itself would actually introduce that concept of where we might actually see a decrease in the amount of funding we would receive directly from the state. It’s simply an unknown.”

STUDENT POPULATION DECLINE
The district is also losing students. The student count for this year, which is used to compute funding from the state, is expected to be down about 239 students, adding to a trend of negative numbers in student count over the last few years.

“We don’t know what the impact of the Learns Act will have on enrollment numbers. This first year, we’ve seen charter schools in the river valley expand. We’ll continue to see that as they market and they grow. We’ll also see the expansion of a new charter school that should begin next year, inside the city limits, and that will be targeting a totally different student population,” Warren said. “So we’ve got two or three charter schools that are targeting different populations, so that’s unfortunate for us because it’s pulling from our student count.”

The assessment growth will bring in about $2.65 million in new revenue for the district for the next school year. However, the increase in foundation funding for next school year is not big enough to be offset by the decline in student enrollment. The district is looking at a decrease in state funding of $800,000. This leaves a net increase of $1.85 million in new funds for the 2024-25 school year, Warren said.

The district also will lose $2.5 million in expiring Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds because ESSER funds will end at the end of the school year. Though the district earmarked much of that federal funding, which came from COVID-19 federal relief packages, for indoor air quality as well as expansion of some of schools, it also used funds for salary and benefits for some janitorial staff as well as some classroom staff, Warren said.

“That federal program ending means we have to shift (those salaries) back into operating funds,” Warren said. “Moving that the last couple of years allowed us to be as aggressive as we have been on the salary schedule over the last two years. These positions, which are needed still in the district, are returning to an operational cost.”

ADDED EXPENSES
The district’s new cost for the coming school year includes $2.5 million, plus $900,000 to fund the next step pay increases already on the step schedule for staff and $400,000 for the cost of adding two new assistant principals at the elementary school level, making the total new expenses to the district $3.8 million, Warren said.

The district has an assistant principal for every two elementary schools. Administration seeks to increase that to an assistant principal at each of the district’s elementary schools within the next two school years to provide better safety and supervision, said Superintendent Terry Morawski.

Also, in order to provide better salary and benefits over the past few years, the district has looked into handling the increased cost of maintenance and operations through efficiencies and other manners, Warren said.

“We are at the point where we now have to take a look at those inflationary costs of M&O, and they have to be part of the decision of how we handle and what is available in revenue to put on the salary schedule,” he said, noting significant cost increases in food commodities as well as insurance.

The district has to be prudent and financially sound and conservative going forward, which means the salary schedules need to stay as they are for the coming year, Warren said.

“That’s why this salary schedule, while it is disappointing to see that it is exactly the same as it is currently right now, is still a significantly better salary schedule than what was presented to the staff three years ago. We’ve seen good growth based some on the Learns Act as well as some of our own decision making and restructuring,” Warren said.

Changes to the salary schedules passed in 2023 included a starting base salary for first-year teachers with a bachelor’s degree at $50,200 and increased the base pay by $2,000. It also added steps 23-25 to the classified and certified salary schedules and added a base increase of about $1,000 to the salary schedules for all steps up to step 25 for all classified employees.