Albany County Schools to raise staff salaries, reduce workforce
Albany County School District No. 1 will cut the equivalent of 15 full-time positions to fund a salary increase for its certified and classified staff. Administrators are excluded from those raises.
Albany County Schools will likely cut more than a dozen positions from next year’s budget, freeing up money that will then be used to raise salaries for nearly all remaining employees.
The Albany County School Board approved the proposal during its meeting Wednesday, tacking on related proposals to incentivize early retirements.
The approved budget option will raise classified wages by $3 an hour and certified salaries by $2,500 a year. Those pay bumps will be financed by cutting the equivalent of 15 full-time positions.
That doesn’t necessarily mean 15 people will be laid off. The district will get as close as it can to that 15 through “attrition” — by, for example, encouraging retirements and not filling vacancies.
The school board approved a $10,000 cash payout for employees who officially announce their resignation by March 8 — an effort to nudge teachers or other staff already weighing the pros and cons of retirement.
Albany County School District No. 1 is in a difficult financial position. Declining contributions from the state, recent inflation, and what several trustees now see as a years-long mismanagement of the district’s finances have left the district needing to simultaneously “rightsize” its overall budget while increasing pay for teachers and other employees. Those employees, meanwhile, are now paying more for health insurance and effectively making less than they have in years past.
The new moves this week are an attempt to address a little of all of that.
“This can be a phased approach,” School Board Vice-Chair Carrie Murthy said during the meeting Wednesday. “We might not get exactly where we want to be with these options. But we can take a big step towards a big goal.”
Still, cutting positions is never easy, as Trustee Janice Marshall lamented.
“Those are families, those are people, who depend on these jobs, on this income,” she said. “But I agree we have to start to right the ship at some point. We can’t just continue the way we’ve been going.”
The budget option approved Wednesday should not be confused with the district budget itself, which will still have to be crafted, debated and approved in the coming months. But with the school board’s go-ahead, district administrators will start identifying which positions can be cut and can now draft a districtwide budget that reflects pay increases for nearly all employees.
Almost all classified staff qualify for public assistance
Albany County School District employs about 700 FTE, or full-time equivalents. That does not mean exactly 700 humans working exactly 700 jobs. Rather, it means that by adding up the various full-time and part-time or quarter-time positions throughout the district, one can arrive at the fact that Albany County School District No. 1 supports the equivalent of around 700 full-time positions.
The district will cut 15 full-time equivalents from next year’s budget.
Giving a presentation to the school board earlier this month, District CFO Trystin Green explained that 85 percent of the district’s budget goes to its workforce. Despite this, most employees are significantly underpaid.
“Over 88 percent of your classified staff qualify for some sort of family assistance based off of their salary alone,” Green told the school board. “When I say some sort of assistance, that’s housing assistance, food stamps — all of those different programs.”
A memo from Superintendent John Goldhardt and other administrators adds:
“Our current salaries are not competitive with other districts in the state. For example, the most recent [Wyoming Education Association] salary comparison shows that ACSD1 teacher salaries are the third lowest in the state. A recent comparison of bus driver salaries shows that we are the lowest paid in the state.”
The budget option approved by the school board Wednesday aims to address this, raising classified wages by $3 an hour and certified salaries by $2,500 a year. Green had presented other, less aggressive options to the board as well — but those other options, despite raising employee pay, would not have kept up with the rising cost of health insurance premiums. That means, even receiving a raise, many employees would be taking home less than they were two years ago.
The pay bumps are powered by a “reduction in force” of 15 full-time equivalents. But those pay bumps also depend on the state’s biennium budget, which is being hammered out by the Wyoming Legislature this month.
Currently, the budget bill includes an “external cost adjustment” — or an ECA — for Wyoming school funding. An ECA is a specific addition to a school’s funding tied to inflation and decided by the state government.
If lawmakers pass the budget bill in its current form, Albany County stands to gain $2.5 million from this year’s ECA.
The current plan — to bump salaries for almost all employees — depends not just on reducing the workforce by 15 positions but also on receiving that full $2.5 million.
“If the ECA doesn't pass, we pretty much have to go back to the drawing board,” Goldhardt told the board. “It's too significant of an amount not to have that impact.”
That funding is so crucial that Trustee Marshall said district employees and families should contact lawmakers.
“I encourage every single person here to email our Albany County legislators and everybody on the Appropriations Committee,” she said. “Go through and email as many legislators as you can to advocate for that ECA. Tell them your story, tell them what it means to you to not be getting a livable wage. I think they really need to hear.”
Incentivizing retirement
In addition to the budget option itself, the school board approved a pair of resolutions that will incentivize employees to retire. Superintendent Goldhardt said voluntary resignations and retirements will reduce the need for actual layoffs.
“The first attempt is always to try to do this through attrition,” he said. “And so this is part of that — to help make an incentive for, perhaps, the folks that are thinking about retirement, to make that a little more lucrative.”
Early resignations or retirements also help the district plan for the next year, so the pair of resolutions approved Wednesday declare that:
Certified employees who submit resignations early — specifically by 3 p.m. on Friday, March 8 — will receive a $1,000 bonus upon the completion of their contract.
The first 30 certified employees who are eligible to retire and decide to do so this year will receive a $10,000 one-time payout upon the completion of their contract. To qualify, the employee must hand deliver their retirement notification to Human Resources by 3 p.m. on Friday, March 8. Seven employees have already taken up this offer.
Trustee Steve Gosar asked Goldhardt how he arrived at the $10,000 figure.
“We wanted to make it enough that it was worthwhile, but it also wouldn’t kill us financially,” Goldhardt said. “Of course we would like it to be higher, but we can’t.”
The Haves and the Have-Nots
The raises approved by the school board will go to all certified and classified staff, but not administrators, who already make much more.
Trustee Gosar voted in favor of the budget option, but said he was concerned about leaving administrators out of the pay raises.
“The district is one big team,” Gosar said. “I don't think that it’s responsible to just ignore one group, just because they're maybe making a little bit more. They also have advanced degrees and have put the time and the effort into achieving and earning those salaries. So I don't think separating the groups makes a lot of sense to me.”
Trustee Nate Martin said he could see where Gosar was coming from, but objected strongly to his reasoning.
“Our team is already split between people who qualify for public assistance — and live on poverty wages and have to walk to work when their car breaks down because they can't afford to fix it — and people who don't. That's a split team,” Martin said. “It makes me sick to my stomach that we pay so little to people who work for our school district.”
Trustee Cecilia Aragón agreed that non-administrator salaries should take precedence.
“I want to echo Trustee Martin's concerns about the haves and the have-nots within our school system,” she said. “Our classified and certified staff is our priority. And maybe next year it’s going to be our upper administration as our priority, and then we take turns. But that's going to take time to make it equitable.”
Trustee Emily Siegel-Stanton said the district should not ignore administrator salaries, lest it find itself scrambling to remain competitive the next time it needs to hire a superintendent or CFO.
“This is an emergency to have so many of our certified staff qualifying for public assistance,” she said. “But I don't want to fall into a false choice of saying, ‘Well, this is the most urgent financial need right now in the district, so we can't also do that.’”
And things could get worse if the state approves $5,000 to families to go private - not to mention what Charter Schools take from the state wide school budget. Finally, ACSD has the best elementary schools in the state - every child gets a “neighborhood” school and yet they are already trying to tear that concept down by closing Bietel.