001Welcome to the St. Green Valley Schools Board of Education study session of May 20th. Sarah will you please call the roll? Sure. Mrs. Babs excused. Mr. Burkle? Present. Mrs. Gilligan? Present. Mrs. Horanek here. Mr. Lechuga excused. Mrs. Solomon? Here. Mrs. Weiss? Here. Great. Thank you. First up on the agenda we have employee evaluation process. Good evening everyone. I am pleased to introduce Ms. Pateslip, one of our executive directors in human resources who's also been an educator in our system and is now one of our gurus in human resources in the area of employee evaluation. So we're pleased to be able to share with you an overview of our employee evaluation processes, always looking at continuing to grow and support our outstanding staff. All right so as we think about teacher evaluation in our system, it
002really is that idea of continuous growth. Evaluation shouldn't be a singular event where someone goes in and does an evaluation and that's it. It should be a cycle of improvement and a cycle of growth for our teachers. So it really begins with that goal setting, observation planning, what is it that that teacher wants to work on that particular school year. Then that should flow into the classroom observation. So when that principal or that assistant principal goes in, they're thinking about and helping that teacher work towards the goals that they have set and then they meet and they talk about it afterwards. And then that helps feeds into next time I come in the classroom, let's look to see are we implementing what we talked about? Are there other strategies that we want to be considering
003moving forward? But rather than in a linear event of we start with this, then we do this, then we do this, we want it to be more of a circle and more of a cycle that continues to feed continuous improvement for our teachers. So a little about the legal piece related to educator evaluation. So beginning in the 13-14 school year, Senate Bill 10191 went into effect and that really fundamentally changed what teacher evaluation looked like. So prior to that, it really was this principal goes in, does an observation and gives feedback and that's what the entire evaluation is based on are those observational pieces of data. And what this law changed was to say that's one part is what we see, the other part of a teacher's evaluation will now be how the students perform.
004And so when 191 was rolled out, it was a 50-50 split between what we call teacher professional practices and then these measures of student learning. So what do we see the teacher do and then what do we see the outcomes for kids being and moving those together to make a full evaluation effectiveness score. It also created state model rubrics that identified standards and elements for our teachers, for our special services providers. This is what it means to be an effective teacher. The other thing that it changed is previously once a teacher was established with non-probationary status, that moved forward with them forever. And what 191 change is that if the teacher has achieved non-probationary status and then has two less than effective evaluation ratings, they can move back to probationary status. So it's no longer
005I move to that and I'm there forever, it can adjust a teacher status based on their evaluation. Then in the 23-24 school year, there was a new Senate bill 70 that made some adjustments to the initial premise of 191. So this shifted that 70% of the teachers evaluation will be that professional practices, what we see their teacher doing, and 30% of that will be measures of student learning. We believe that that's a really positive change. Some of the feedback that came out of teachers were really feeling a lot of pressure. If I teach in a Title I school, if I teach children on IEPs that so much, half of my evaluation is based on that student data, that I have some level of control over and some level that I may not have control over.
006It also changed what types of data we can use for that measure of student learning. So previously we really were tied to our state level achievement data, our CMAS data. And one of the challenges with that is the timeline of when we get data from CMAS. So we don't get this year's data until the fall. And so when teachers would write goals on CMAS, they were actually writing goals on last year's data. So they were walking into the school year writing a goal of last year I will have achieved and that's what goes on their current evaluation. So CMAS data and state achievement data can still be a data point for schools if they'd like that to be. But also you can use more real-time local assessment measures to be able to say this is
007really what I achieved in this school year and my goal is based on that, not based on old outdated data. It also added some new pathways for highly effective educators because one of the things that 191 did was say that every teacher needs an evaluation every year. And so this added some additional opportunities for highly effective educators at the state level to be able to have some modified pathways. And then it created some additional rubrics. So previously we had a teacher rubric and we have special services rubric and but there they created new rubrics for special ed teachers for librarians for a couple of other specialty positions are now available. And there were additional training requirements for evaluators to make sure that we understood best practices as related to evaluations. So that's the big picture
008of the legal work that guides our evaluation process. So as we think about our employee groups in St. Rain we have four, five types of groups when we think about evaluations. So we have what we call our certified or our licensed personnel. So that's our teaching staff, anyone that holds a CDE license. So it includes our teachers, it includes our counselors, our school nurses, our speech paths, our sites, that group of licensed by the state educators that work with our students. And we have our school administrators who have a license through CDE. Those are the two groups that are garnered by that Senate Bill 191 and are spelled out and exactly what those evaluations have to be. Then for our other employee groups we have our central office administration, we have our professional technical staff,
009and we have our classified staff. Those are locally managed in terms of what we choose to do as a system. All right so as we think about our certified staff, again these are the people who are directly working with children who have a license through CDE. And we have two different ways that we evaluate our teachers. So prior to Senate Bill 17 we talked about there's that highly effective pathway. We actually long before that was written into law had to differentiate a set of ways that we evaluate our teachers. And so we have the state model rubric, that system where we've got a rubric, and really what that's designed to look at is a broad spectrum of discrete skills it takes to be a good teacher. So what is your pedagogy? What is your classroom
010management? What is your parent communication? What is your leadership? How do you use technology? All of these little skills it takes to be a really good teacher. But it doesn't go very in depth because it's the scattershot approach of all these little discrete skills. So then we created these alternative options and really what that's designed to do is to look more deeply at one of those discrete skills. So a teacher says this year I want to focus on technology or I'm teaching a new class or I'm teaching a new grade level or I want to implement a new curriculum and I want feedback more in depth on this one or two things as opposed to 15 different things. And so what we've designed our system to look like is that every three years a teacher
011gets the rubric evaluation. They get that full comprehensive look. So they do that full comprehensive look. They get an updated rating and then if they're effective or highly effective they can move to the alternative options. We can go more in depth for two years and then we go back to the rubric. And so they can get a cross section then they can go more in depth. You get a cross section they can go more in depth to allow our educators to have variety in their evaluation. What we also do within that alternative option is give options within the options. So we have one that procedurally mirrors our just regular rubric process with observations and check-ins and feedback. We have other options that allow the teacher to engage in some self-reflection and some other opportunities for
012observation. So one is a self-reflection with an AI enhancement where they can do some videos and interact with an AI bot to talk about their teaching and ask some reflective questions. And then the other one is a peer observation one. That one's my favorite tool by far and is our least utilized tool by far because there's some logistical constraints with it. But it's lovely to be able to partner up with another teacher and look at their teaching practices and get feedback from someone else. And you only know as a teacher what happens in your four walls. So somebody next door could be doing this amazing thing that you may or may not know about. So the peer observation provides these opportunities for teachers to see what other folks are doing. And what I love about
013it is you can pair up. It doesn't have to be second grade to second grade. It can be first grade to fifth grade or science to math. Or if you're singleton in your school, you're the one music teacher, you can pair up with another music teacher in another school. And I think the beauty that came out of COVID and us learning how to do WebEx are ways that we can do this without the one music teacher at this school having to drive to see the other music teacher at this school. So I think it's underutilized because it does shift some of the workload to the teacher in a different way. But I think it's probably one of our most powerful options. But those have been in place in our system for probably about nine years
014that we allow our teachers to have these alternative ways to be evaluated. And I think it's been a powerful change for our teachers and a welcome change from this same rubric that looks the exact same year after year after year. So principal evaluations are also underneath that Senate Bill 191. They have two similar tools just like our teachers. They have a rubric and then they have a self-reflection alternative option. And they're on that same type of cycle where they do a rubric, then they can do alternative options, then they go back on the rubric as well. So that's for our principals and our assistant principals. Then as we think about our central administrators, our professional technical staff, and our classified staff, they have a different type of evaluation because they have a different type of
015role. So theirs has a self-evaluation component where they rate themselves in a variety of different areas. They set goals with their evaluator, then there's some of that anecdotal feedback along the way, and then the supervisor finishes out that evaluation, that grading scale at the end of the year. So annually we have to provide data to CDE related to teacher evaluation and just general HR status. So some of the things we have to report are evaluation ratings, so how our teachers do every year on that professional practices piece and on the measures of student learning. We also have to report on in-field status. It was previously called highly qualified, but that idea of how many of our teachers are credentialed to teach the courses that they're teaching. So what does that alignment look like between their
016licensure area and the courses they're teaching day to day. There's a special ed component of that as well. So how are we doing as far as filling our special ed positions with our percentages of students in different disability categories? We have to report that every year. And then there's data about hard to fill and what pathways we're using. So the last questions about do you have teachers on alternative license, emergency license? Did you have to collapse classes because you couldn't find a licensed educator to be able to, this all funnels into some state reporting requirements about how we're filling teacher positions. And then in St. Vrain, we use our data to support educators and professional growth pathways. We have recently created an additional rubric for our staff who are like instructional coaches or teacher mentors
017to help grow them into potentially administrators or other types of support roles. So we've gotten creative in how we've made some of our tweaks to our evaluation system. We also monitor employee performance and how that relates to student achievement and then professional development offerings as well. So a quick glance of the two categories that we have to report out to the state are certified staff that includes any of those special service providers, speech, OTE, counselors, all those pieces, and that are principals and assistant principals. So as you can see, we have a lot of really effective educators in our system, which is exactly where we want it to be. Partially effective, you'd want to see that a small number, and that could be for a variety of reasons. That could be that they're a first
018year teacher, and so they're still working on their skills. That could be a teacher who we had concerns about, and we've made the decision not to renew their contract for next year. And that may be where they are with that rating. And then as you see, we also have lots of highly effective and effective principles. So we are also required to have an evaluation council that gives us feedback about our evaluation system and about our processes. We are going to work to reinvigorate that particular committee. We've had a little bit of a lull with that committee, but we want to reinvigorate that in conjunction with our association to really think about what are some goals, what are some things that we might need to adjust. We're also working, Amanda will get to this in a
019future slide, to modernize our system. So when we moved away from the state model system, our amazing technology team built our current evaluation system, and it works pretty well most days. Today, when teachers were trying to adjust things, it had glitches on the back end. So we're due for a refresh, and there's a timing component of that. We don't necessarily want to rebuild our whole entire system until we make sure that it does what we want it to do in alignment with our values around evaluation. So it's this a little bit of a chicken and egg. If we revamp our evaluation system, we need a technological system that can support us in doing that. And we don't want to build a technological system and make some changes to that if we're going to make some
020changes on the philosophical side. So we've got to kind of work both ends of that to hopefully modernize our system so it's not so clunky for our teachers and for our principles. Thank you. So training is very important in professional learning for our employees and how to use the tool, how the how the evaluation system itself works, and then making sure that our certified staff and non certified employees understand that evaluation process, that it's collaborative, that it's a growth mindset that we're giving specific opportunities for feedback to continue to grow each and every one of our employees. And so part of that is training. And so we train our principals each school year, the best practices on reminders for evaluation due dates on our master agreement items as well. Our certified staff also receive trainings
021at the beginning of the year. And we work with all of our evaluators to make sure that throughout the year they know what's coming up. We do tabletop exercises with them. We want to make sure our evaluators understand when those timelines and due dates and what those processes are so that we can make sure that one, we're following our master agreement and our evaluation processes and two, that we're providing that timely feedback for employee growth. We also became an approved trainer through that Senate Bill 70 implementation where we had to initiate some additional trainings. And so we had a large scale training, I believe it was last year of all of our evaluators. And we're so appreciative that we got to work with OPD and some experts evaluator trainees. And part of that was also
022part of relicensure. And so even individuals in this room who don't necessarily evaluate teachers anymore, we all like myself example, we had to make sure that we were a part of those trainings so that when we could also get our relicensure around the area of principal licensure. And then we continue to offer ongoing professional learning at each of our level meetings that we have with our our school leaders. And then in addition, it's really important that we continue to provide that ongoing coaching and support for those that are struggling performance wise and make sure that they have that assistance to help them have that opportunity to grow and improve. And then we are also leaning in more heavily with our department leaders so that we can make sure that they understand the non certified evaluation
023process and and to make sure that we are evaluating each of those employees every year. So as Kate shared, we will be reconvening our 1338 committee to establish priorities for the next school year. And then we also meet with our classified meet and confer committee. And we've done some work this year thanks to Kate on reviewing the non certified evaluation tool. And I think we have some opportunities to look at how that flows from the self evaluation process to the mid year to the end of the year. And and that ongoing feedback throughout the year. So we'll bring some upcoming revisions as we meet together in the future. And we can share that with you as we progress that tool. And then like Kate shared also, that business modernization process. So trying to make sure
024that we have more automation, that we have a system that is easy to use, that is less comfy, and that we have the something more modern that allows a lot of more, a lot more collaboration in that evaluation tool and process. And then also with that increased capability around evaluation metrics. So we shared with you some initial evaluation data for those going through the state model. We also want to be able to do that and produce that information for our non certified employee evaluation ratings as well. And then as always, as we partner with the association, as we partner with our school leaders, and our supervisors, we will continue to provide evaluation support, and then keep looking at trends and practices and calibration in our addition system. We also this year, thanks to St. Brain
025and to Jackie, worked and have a bill that was introduced in legislation and made some great progress, I think, in terms of advocating for that local control in the evaluation tool, one and what that tool looks like, what those rules are, and what those processes are, knowing that each district is very unique, and the needs and priorities of districts are unique across the state. And so I know that part of that was engaging with every school district across the state, with HR leaders as well. And the bill did not progress further this season, that we'll consider and see what we want to do in terms of reintroducing it next session. And we have a support team always in HR to support our system. And we welcome any questions that you have. Thank you. Do the
026report members have any questions? One thing that I'd like to share is that I believe that teaching is developmental. And so to see some partially effective teachers feels completely okay. New teachers, novice teachers to the profession will always need time to kind of figure out their classroom management and organization and how to do the planning and how to keep making their lessons better and more engaging. And none of that is a problem and absolutely something to be expected. And so it's not good or bad. It's just developmental, much like reading is for children, like walking is for children. And we have lots of supports in place for that. But if we see partially effective teachers in that percentage breakdown, it's such a normal thing to have happen in our system. And we should always encourage
027new teachers to be part of our system knowing that they have things to learn because they also bring a lot of new energy. They bring fresh perspectives. They bring a different alignment to the generation of kids they're working with and they will get it. For the most part, our new teachers in time will get it. So I just wanted to make sure that if we see that partially effective piece that we're always striving to have teachers be effective or highly effective. But it's completely normal to have teachers be partially effective when they start the profession. And that's okay. You know, thank you. I also want to give a huge compliment to our HR team. I am telling you they work tirelessly to support 5500 employees, all of the evaluations, oftentimes working closely with principals to
028have them be better in their evaluation skills. They do staff investigations. They work on the benefits side of things. They do all of the hiring processes for our schools and for our administrators. We've had some shift in administration this year. All of those processes happen at night after school because we don't pull committees together off the floor. We don't pull them out of classrooms. And they've run so many processes this year. They're often on the phone talking to me at nine o'clock at night when their committee has ended. They're on the phone next thing in the morning because they're doing background checks and they're trying to get the next set of interviews set up. And they are just an incredible support for for our schools and for the central team. And so thank you both
029and your whole HR team for all that you do. They also do a lot of work with negotiations. Those are more evenings. I venture to say that you all have probably worked 100 to 150 evenings this school year, if not more. And it's a lot. Amanda drives down to Douglas County every night when she's done with work. And Kate is a working mom. Amanda is a working mom. And something gives along the way when you're giving that much time to assist them. And then the rest, Sarah, also is a working mom. And Ty also drives in from Parker. So they are a very dedicated team and they do a great job. We're honored to serve in such a great district and great leaders. Yeah. Thank you, Kate. I'm going to send Kate home so she
030can feed your kids, Kate. They're hungry. They are hungry. They're growing. Okay, next up we have Foundations of Compensation. Okay. Thank you. Well, thank you for another opportunity to share with you in partnership with Tony around compensation and understanding how compensation setting occurs and just high level basics around that. And just another quick snapshot on the finances behind that. And I just have to start off by saying, I so appreciate getting to work with you and partner with you. We, we work so very closely together and it's easy when you have a great partner. And so thank you so much. Thank you. High degree of trust and collaboration between the two departments, which not every school district enjoys. So I appreciate the same thing. Thank you. So when we look at certified compensation structures, there
031are multiple things that go into, into a compensation structure. One is the negotiated process that we're fortunate to have concluded and it's in process. And we'll share about that at our board meeting next week. So there's master agreement language that dictates those salary setting guidelines for certified staff and how individuals move across the salary schedule. And then there's other factors such as the number of days and an employee calendar. And so we have many in our district that range from 174 to 248 days in regards to our certified teachers, number of student contact days. When you think of calendars, professional learning days, all of the various factors, again, that go into, and some of those are inclusive in our master agreement. And then we have the structure of the certified salary schedule. So we've got,
032you'll see an example here coming up. You've got experience steps for how many years someone has been in or how many years we recognize upon coming in. We have those educational lanes. So you often hear in school districts, you know, steps and lanes. So the steps are those experience steps. The lanes are recognizing the education, the formal education of a teacher. And then again, we do have something called the lateral moves process, which basically is the ability for a teacher to move this way on the schedule while they move down in the year's experience, all budgeted. So here's an example. This is our salary schedule. So again, when we say experience steps, they're here. And then education lanes go this way. So brand new teacher comes in with bachelor's degree, step one first year, that
033would be their salary, 64.5. If I am a teacher that comes in from with lots of experience, and I have 10 years of experience in a master's degree. So in our master agreement, we recognize up to a certain number of steps. So you would start at step seven master's degree. So in the certified compensation structure, we you get to kind of trace and find that spot on the salary schedule. Anything else you want to share about this time? Oh, I can share some. I think what's really interesting about this, and I'm going to talk about it toward the end. But what's interesting is how this changes year to year, because there's a couple of mechanisms that affect it. But the primary one, and you hear us all the time talking about this, how much how
034much do we increase to the base this year? How much do we increase the basis use? And that's what Amanda was mentioning is this is the base. And all of these other cells are calculated based on parameters that are driven from this base number. And in our circumstance, they're fixed dollar amounts. So you go across, there's a fixed dollar amount that tells that that builds this salary schedule based on this number, how far to go across how much how much you go up go across. And then there's also an incremental step amount that says how much each of these grow as you go down a step. And if you'll notice the amounts that this grows step so so year by year, if you're in a BA, goes slower than if you were over an MA
03580, you'll notice the numbers here grow faster. And they also grow faster on a higher number. So there's a lot of incentive to for our teachers to root to get their education higher higher, get their master's degree, get additional credits, which they're already required to do to some degree. They're not necessarily required to get a master's, but they have to get credits anyway. So all they need to do is turn them in. They want to get to a certain number of credits, they're going to move over anyway, just got to turn them in. So anyway, that's all I'll talk about this for now. But there's a whole bunch of very interesting mechanics about this. Sorry, one other thing I did want to ask or mention. The mechanics of this were redesigned in 2016. Prior to
0362016, remember I've just mentioned that these are all built off of this number on a hard dollar amount across and down. If those dollar amounts don't change, then when you add $1,000 to this number, then every single one of these is also going to go up by $1,000. Prior to that, prior to 2016, these were calculated on a percentage. We call it the five by five. So we go five percent, five percent, five percent up, and then five percent, five percent, five percent, right? So you have this growing calculation that when you added $1,000 here, you didn't apply $1,000 across. It was a multiplicative impact. And what that caused is the cost of an increase here to be so exorbitant that we could not move that number. It just, the cost was so high. These
037were going up so fast. This whole schedule was broadening so quickly that we couldn't afford to increase this base salary at all. So we got together with the Education Association. We did a whole big work session, many months, a whole bunch of work, and we redesigned it to be a fixed dollar amount. Now that does have some other detriments that we can talk about we don't need to get into now, but it did allow us to really start focusing on increasing this base salary so that we could attract and retain teachers that our work renewed, as well as still make sure that we weren't harming our veteran teachers as well. So thank you. And there's certain, like our green, those green areas, those are our longevity steps, recognizing certain milestones and individuals' careers. And then
038there's certain points when you get to the end of a column, we've got lots of different master agreement language around what the pay looks like then. But overall, we want to make sure that we continue to educate our teachers so that they know we do want them to continue their education. And if they have credits that are in between a 20 and a 40, they can save those till the next time that they can move twice a year on the salary schedule. You'll also notice that the number of steps available in each lane are lower, longer, more the further you get. So if you don't get additional education, you're going to like stop at say 14, you're going to stop at 16 until you get your education. And once you get your education, you can
039move over and then you can proceed further down. So two things. First, just to clarify, this is the salary not inclusive of benefits. That's correct. Right. And then the second thing, so like if a teacher were to come in with 15 years of experience, they come in at step seven. Okay, got it. Thank you. And that's a negotiated item. Yep. Thank you for that. Thank you. So there are other opportunities for a teacher to earn additional pays. That is when they fill in for a substitute that doesn't fill through the coaching athletics activities, all the opportunities we provide for students, we need adults to be able to run those and facilitate those. We also, if someone works through their plan time for a particular reason, there's an it's something that happens and they did not
040get their plan time that there is compensation made available to that. Again, we talked about the lateral move opportunity to gather more education to be able to move. We offer district service pay again, for certain milestones in a teacher's career, there's extra duty assignments, and many, many opportunities. So we're really pleased that there's that total compensation package. When we look at our classified professional, technical and administrator group, the compensation structure is not a step in lane model. Their salary range is something that you would tend to see very common in businesses and other organizations. And the items and the factors that drive that are we have some general pay setting guidelines in the employee handbooks, we place individuals on a particular range. So we have administrator ranges, one through nine, I believe, and we've got
041various ranges also for the classified and professional and technical groups as well. And within each of those are job types, job duties, job descriptions and pay ranges. And we also look at years of relevant experience, and years of district experience and education level. We also recognize additional movement in the pay range based on any annual pay increase. So that's how individuals would move would be based upon either increased education, such as associates, bachelors and masters, and then any annual increase budget dependent that would allow an individual to move within the pay range. We also do we have separate salary schedules. We also do market studies cyclically through an individual in HR who just checks us against other school districts, and we are market competitive for sure, as compared to other school districts. And then there's
042a point in which if someone within their position, it's that top of the range. So I'm going to make it up and we'll share an example in a minute. Actually, if you hit that top of the range, it's a one time stipend that is offered depending on one year. That's right. Depending on the increase in compensation that year, we provide a one time stipend for anyone who would normally move out of that range that we can't move out of that range. And I'll explain that just a bit. Yep. And, and Tony, if you would incorporate in how that pay, one time pay is calculated to when you fall on the outside of the top of the range for that one time pay that that equates to your salary, the next year, it does not build
043to your base salary again. It's that it's a one time pay. I think the visual will help. I have a little visual here that will show. So here's an example. I think this is PT to range to on our professional technical salary schedule. We have three primary non certified salary schedules. That's classified, professional, technical and administrative. Our classified salary schedule is an hourly rate. Our professional, technical and administrator schedules are an annual salary. So this is an annual amount for those job types or positions that fall in range to. Now, within that range, depending on all the factors that Amanda mentioned earlier, an individual might reside within the range at a certain place. They might be close to the minimum. They might be around midpoint. They might be around the maximum depending on where they
044started and how long they've been with the district. So what we're going to talk about how someone moves through the range, because we have two different things that impact the pay of non certified individuals. Number one is how much this range overall moves year to year, right? It might move by the cost of living or even less. But typically we try to move it by around cost of living. That's not always 100%, but that's their general goal each year. Then people can move within the range, right? And those two things combined usually result in an individual's total increase in compensation year over year. So here's an example, salary movement example, normal within pay. So this individual was a little bit lower than midpoint. They were at 79.85. And if you want to just click for
045me, I designed a little animation slides over. So this individual would move 2.3%. So their movement would slide within the range. So they would at that point get 81.06 except for this year, this year that I'm talking about, which I think was last year, the year before. The total increase in compensation was 4.19. So that's broken up into how much the range slides and how much the individual moves within the range. So we talked about they move within the range 2.3%. Click again. And then they move the remaining 4.19. Oh, can you click one more time? Yeah, sorry. The animation didn't look right. Sorry. One of them. Can you go back? Go back one more. There we go. Okay, thank you. I misspoke. I apologize. I misspoke. The first is the movement of the range.
046That was the 2.3%. So you'll see they stay about the same place. And the whole thing moves over when Amanda clicks. There we go. That's what I was trying to illustrate. So the whole thing moves. That was the movement of the range of COLA, which was that year. Then the next step is then moving within the range, the remaining. Yeah, thank you very much. Yep. So you can move one more. The remaining 1.89%. And that year, our increase in compensation was 4.19%. So that was that was comprised of the movement of the range and their movement within the range. Does that make sense? Yes. Sorry, I was I confused everyone there for a second because I misspoken that first step. So now let's go to an example. The next one here, Amanda, it's here. One
047more where someone might be sitting at the very top of their range. This is what Amanda was alluding to with regard to how we would provide a one time stipend. So in this circumstance, this person is sitting right at the top of their range. Now, first, we would move the range by the cost of living, which is 2.3%. So they would increase as there's there's still the same place, right? But the range moves up by 2.3%. So they would normally get 99964. But remember, we increased by 4.19 that particular year. But they can't move within the range because they're already topped out. So it says, oh, they would have been at 101811, but they can't move outside the range. So what we do is we provide a one time stipend of 1847. We give them
048that difference. However, their base salary resets to 99964. That's how the following year is calculated, if that makes sense. So you want to click one more time. Here's the example. And this is what we use to try to explain to employees. So I know it may not be as relevant to you, but they're a lot more invested. So when this happens, so here's how we would explain what happened when, hey, someone's topped out in their range and why they're getting a one time stipend and how they how they how their compensation is calculated each year. So anyway, does that make sense? Do we have any questions on that? I hope that was more clarifying than confusing. But again, I think to most employees, they would pay more attention and ask more questions. But if you
049have any questions on how this works, I'm happy to answer them. I do want to move on to the sort of the budget impacts, the dollar impacts. As you as you have heard, we talk about this 85% metric pretty frequently in the district's general fund operating budget. Salaries and benefits combined are about 85% of our expenses. And so you can see salaries is the largest chunk. We break that down with para and health and dental. These are the the three main components that add up to that 85%. And then non personnel here is the other 16 in this situation. So it's 84 and 16. In this example from rounding any evil eyed people who might be looking at this might know that our budget is really closer to 525. And if you're adding these numbers
050up, you'll get to about 475. And the reason that is that we exclude the charter allocations from this calculation. So there's another 50 million or so in terms of allocations in the charters that are excluded from this and also included in the general fund. So when we were talking earlier about the changes to the salary schedule, I was like to this is where we track the historical activity of our competition increases, both from the certified as well as the non certified side. You can see here this goes back to FY 13. And if you go if you notice, our FY 16 is when we made that change, you can see we made some we were making really small increases. And then finally, we hit FY 16. These were pretty common. These were as aggressive as
051we could afford to increase the base pre 2016. Then when we had once we had 2016, you can see we were doubling more than doubling our base increase from previous years, all the way up at a little blip here 750. But you can see then we really were cranking these throughout the post COVID years, as you know, some really amazing increases in base salary. And again, these are increases to all individuals on certified salary schedule, not just the those on the base. The this is the increased percentage of just the base amount. But this is where the amount that was the impacts all of our other employee groups. So what we do is try to keep the proportion of compensation equivalent year to year for the amount that we pay into for teachers versus our
052other employee groups. In general, it's not a hard and fast rule. But for the most part, what we do is we try to be equitable as we agree with compensation with the Education Association, we come up with an overall percentage increase of how much our compensation for the certified certified employee group costs. And we apply that percentage to our other employee groups are classified, our professional technical, and in some cases, our admin, though, sometimes admin, we actually decrease that percentage of those groups, depending on the year. So that's what this increase is. And so when we would increase the amount, let's say in FY 18, we increase the base by 1500. That resulted in an equivalent of 4.63% increase for all teachers on average, not for the individual teacher for all teachers on average. And
053so we would apply that to our classified professional technical. And then this was the how much we slid the ranges. Remember, we were talking earlier about movement within the range versus how much the range slid. This is the range change. And then this was the overall compensation increase. So the difference between those two was how much people moved within the range. So in terms of where we're at now, and what you'll see in our upcoming board meeting item next week is subject to board approval and SBBEA ratification is a 2.32% increase for certified. That's as Tony shared, an $800 increase to the base salary with our new starting salary at $65,300, keeping us among the highest groups in terms of starting salary, granting those experience steps and education lanes. The increase is also applied to
054the extra pay schedule, the athletics and activities schedule. Also, as part of that total compensation is a granting of one additional day or seven hours of annual leave for teachers in their first three years of employment. So going from 49 hours to 56 hours through our negotiations process, increasing the hours eligible from annual leave eligible for payout at retirement from 875 hours to 903 hours. And then new language around career, technical education teachers and what they can submit in terms of credits and training. So we're talking about our very highly specialized positions such as, you know, auto tech, such as our future construction employee and to be able to allow them more opportunities to move on this on the pay schedule outside of formal university coursework. And then the continuance of stipends for our fine
055arts teachers. Thank you have shared. Oh, this is a snapshot of the new pay schedule subject to ratification and board approval. And then for non certified staff, a commensurate 2.32% increase to their hourly rates. And then the same for our professional technical staff and then school and department administrators as well. And then for small and large cabinet, a 1.5% increase as well. And we're available for any questions. Thank you. Thank you, Tony and Amanda. If the board members have any questions. I'm done. I think it's important just to end cap this with. There's a lot of we talk about total compensation is a lot of additional opportunities and benefits that we're providing for our teachers and staff. We talk a lot about salaries and salaries is what a lot of employees are focused on. There's
056just so much more out there. And I want to acknowledge that Christina does let us who is fairly new. She replaced the key mayor. If you remember, Mickey Mayor, she retired. She's been amazing. It's been really focusing on marketing and and showing all those amazing benefits that are available to our employees because a lot of them, I think they're underutilized because they're just not known about. So she's been just awesome and working with our broker rules. Towers Watson, Amanda and her team have really engaged with finance on all that process as well. I've been very thankful for that. So as we find or not wind up as we spin up that process coming this summer, we're not too far out. We'll be giving lots of updates to the board as that takes down. We'll just
057be enhancing more of what we shared this past this past fall, I believe in terms of benefits and benefit offerings and that total compensation perspective. Yes. Thank you. I had a quick question. Can you speak at all to what's happening in other districts? I know that we are giving an increase, but I have heard that maybe other districts are not doing similar things or haven't been able to quite provide. How are we comparing to how are we comparing? Yeah, I know some anecdotes, but you probably been having a little better than I do in terms of, you know, when we look at base pay for teachers and things and pay increases. Some individual, some districts are still in that final negotiations process. There are some districts that, you know, I saw some information today that
058they had a furlough day. Some are not moving their base at all. Um, some are holding on giving any steps or the lanes or the education movement. Um, and you know, some are also giving, um, an increase that is something that is within their budgetary, you know, within the times of the budget this year. Um, it I would say we're definitely within that range from what I can see. And there are some that are below us as well. Um, some districts, I think Adams 12 is redoing their salary schedule to try and get closer to what safe ring is able to offer. But their schedule looks very different. For example, I believe in that first bachelor's lane, it's the same base salary all the way down. So although they have a step in lane, it
059looks a lot different. And I know Boulder has redone their salary structure as well and offered early retirement incentives to be able to afford some of that. So in in tougher budgetary times, um, districts are choosing to do a lot of different things in order to try to be competitive too. Um, and then there are some situations, as you've heard, where, um, in order to provide any kind of an increase, there have to be reduction in staff and at times. Is there anything else? Yeah, you know, I think, um, we look at that, uh, pretty, um, with curiosity. It's nice to be able to say that you are either the highest or among the highest base pay in the state. Teachers look very carefully at that, and there is, I mean, it, it is, it
060is very different across the board. Our rules, some of our rules are still in 40 something 1000 starting salaries. Um, we have heard of late that Adams 14 just bumped up to 68,000. So they will become, if that is true, the highest starting salary. But they also have a lot of other challenges that St. Brain doesn't have. And we don't quite know how they're doing that. Are they laying off teachers? Are they raising class size in order? So I think what we're trying to do is be very competitive, um, in terms of salary, but not at the expense of something really, really important in another area. For example, we wouldn't want to push class size up to 30 or 32 in order to give another 1000 on the base. And my hunch is teachers wouldn't
061want that either. We are trying to protect jobs as much as possible and not, not lay off. We'll never offer incentives for retiring our, our most expert teachers. Philosophically, I don't believe that's something that we would really be aligned with. Um, furlough days are not fun for staff or the community. Um, teachers count on a certain amount of pay every month in order to make their rent and their house payments and buy their groceries. And, you know, when you take a $300 amount out of somebody's check, that is a starting salary, they will notice that and that will be, that will be a hardship for them. So I don't want to have to resort to any of those kind of things. I, I have communicated that my interest is to pay our teachers as much
062as we can while creating as much stability for the system as we can. And so it will always be that kind of a balance. Some other districts have an eight hour workday. Our teachers still have a seven and a half hour workday. Um, and so none of that is a complete apples to apples comparison, but it does help guide us a little bit and it helps us know how we can market our school district in terms of competitiveness with other school districts. And, and I don't like the, the, I don't really love the comparisons because there's a lot of cherry picking that goes on when you compare things. And in order to compare, you would really have to get into, to all of the work conditions, um, all of the different avenues for pay, all
063of the supports, all of the technology, all of the benefits, all of the, all of the, in order to really compare salaries against each other. I'm sorry. I was, I was just going to add, um, I, I echo that exactly. There's a lot of cherry picking. There's a lot of different ways you could look at it. If you wanted to highlight your system versus someone else's, you kind of ignore all this other stuff and you point out this one individual metric that stands out. Um, uh, and so we try to look at it holistically as best we can. I was like another metric that I'll love to herald that I appreciate is see someone always, people always they look at this number a lot to compare and they look at this number a lot to
064compare, right? They're always comparing those two numbers. Here's the one that I don't see very often. Actually, I don't think I've ever seen this done from a district, district perspective. Imagine if you were a teacher that started in another system 10 years ago versus starting in our system 10 years ago. How fast did your, uh, compensation increase? And these percentages right here, these based increases right here and the impact to our teachers that started here 10 years ago, I think, um, incredibly competitive, incredibly helpful to recognize the employees that have stuck with us, um, and increase their rate much faster than a lot of our peers. And so you could take a snapshot, a one, a one time snapshot, um, and compare across across the district. But if you look at the curve over time,
065I think St. Graham would also really stand out. So that's another one that I really like to point out. It's just, um, very impressed. We're able to give out as much as we can. Thank you. You're up to here. Thank you. I don't request a motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. Thank you. How long paper. Hi. Thank you.