The three remaining Columbia Board of Education candidates said teachers deserve higher pay and support collective bargaining, though one said he had other issues with the National Education Association.
Jay Atkins, Della Streaty-Wilhoit and Blake A. Willoughby remain in the race for the April 2 school board election. Brian C. Jones dropped out of the race Thursday with a statement that he is moving to Wisconsin for a new job. His name will remain on the ballot.
Collective bargaining between negotiating teams for the Columbia Missouri National Education Association and the Columbia Board of Education began last week. Salaries will be part of the negotiation, but the CMNEA team hasn’t yet put forward a specific salary request.
A beginning teacher’s salary is $36,000 in CPS. The average salary for teachers is $53,590 and the top salary in the teachers’ salary schedule is $76,099. The school board’s negotiation team said last year they were working toward a $40,000 starting salary and a simplified salary schedule within a few years.
The minimum salary is near the top starting salaries in the region, according to a salary survey by the Missouri State Teachers Association. The salary schedule maximum is the highest for the region.
Willoughby said the district should try to keep up with the national average while staying in line with the budget and ensure that all teachers have a salary increase each year.
The average public school teacher salary in 2016-17 was $59,660, according to “Rankings of the States 2017 and Estimates of School Statistics 2018” by the NEA. The average salaries ranged from $81,902 in New York to $45,555 in West Virginia.
“I would love for us to hire teachers and have the most competitive salaries and the best salaries we can do at the time,” Willoughby said.
He fully supports collective bargaining for teachers, he said.
“It allows for the amassing of voices and for that collective to be heard,” Willoughby said. “It allows them to say what their needs are.”
Board members should attend collective bargaining sessions as observers, he said. That hasn’t been the practice of current board members.
“That way board members can see what’s really going on and what they’re asking for,” Willoughby said.
Streaty-Wilhoit said inadequate pay for teachers is a statewide problem and addressing it requires strategic planning and budgeting.
“On this issue, we have a long way to go in finding a solution,” she said. “As an educator, I am for paying teachers a higher salary. However, how do we pay for it?”
Salaries and benefits make up 57 percent of spending in the district’s budget, around $181 million.
“I believe collective bargaining is an important process,” Streaty-Wilhoit said. “But it requires distinct identification of source funding. Where are you going to get the pay? We cannot ignore collective bargaining. It is directly correlated with pay and benefits and good salaries.”
Atkins said he’s sympathetic to low pay among professionals. He said as an assistant attorney general in 2007, he made $32,000 and his wife called him crying to tell him their electricity had been shut off.
“You can’t educate children without good teachers and you can’t get good teachers without paying them what they’re worth,” he said. “We may need to get creative.”
Collective bargaining “is the most efficient method to get where we need to go,” Atkins said. He said any other method of determining salaries and benefits would be more time-consuming and costly for the administration.
Although he supports collective bargaining, he said he has policy differences with the NEA.
“I’m in favor of school choice,” he said. “It’s a stark difference with the NEA.”
He said he’s not in favor of gutting funding of public education and he doesn’t favor school vouchers to allow parents to choose private schools. He said he is more favorable to using tax credits for private schools. Atkins said he opposes anything that interferes with parents’ decisions about the best education for their children.
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