Column: New law won’t move needle on NH teacher pay

Contributor Wayne Gersen in West Lebanon, N.H., on April 12, 2019. (Valley News - Geoff Hansen) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com.

Contributor Wayne Gersen in West Lebanon, N.H., on April 12, 2019. (Valley News - Geoff Hansen) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com.

By WAYNE GERSEN

For the Valley News

Published: 08-23-2024 4:53 PM

I was interested to read in Tuesday’s Valley News about how Republican legislators will help New Hampshire school districts find the money needed to provide teachers with ample pay.

Ethan DeWitt’s article from the New Hampshire Bulletin describes a bill the Legislature approved this past session that requires districts to display four charts at least a week before Town Meeting: one showing the average teacher salary over the past 10 years; another showing the average administrator’s salary over the same period; a third to indicate the annual cost per pupil at that district over the same time period; and a fourth to show the salaries of the four highest paid administrators in each district. At the same time New Hampshire districts will be required to “highlight the pay of ‘directors or coordinators of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)’.”

Presumably, the information on these four charts and the costs of DEI will help voters realize that the opulent pay for administrators and DEI is limiting the funds available to pay teachers, a “fact” that GOP legislators believe will be self-evident given that the average pay for New Hampshire Superintendents is $124,777 per year while the average teacher pay is $67,096.

As a former middle school math teacher and (full disclosure) a retired public school superintendent I want to offer a basic arithmetic lesson to the GOP members who believe limiting administrative pay and eliminating DEI directors will help underwrite higher teacher salaries. According to data from Ballotpedia, in 2022 there were 14,009 teachers in New Hampshire and 72 superintendents, or roughly 195 teachers per superintendent. If the average pay for superintendents dropped by $25,000 to get it below six digits, each teacher in the state would be able to receive an additional $128 per year, a whopping 0.2% pay hike.

As nearly as I can determine from Google search, there are three full-time directors of DEI in the state, in Oyster River, Exeter and Manchester. Their cumulative salaries are roughly $350,000. If those wages were spread over 14,000 teachers it would give each teacher in the state $25. This total raise of $153 would not even cover just over a third of what the average New Hampshire teacher spends on supplies.

I believe the GOP legislators understand this basic math and know these facts. They know very well that cutting administrative pay and eliminating DEI administrators will not begin to help compensate New Hampshire teachers. They also know that while the average pay for New Hampshire teachers is $67,096, the average for teachers in the property poor town of Northumberland is $38,400 while the average for teachers in the property rich town of South Hampton is $90,572. They know that this is because New Hampshire relies on property taxes to fund 80% of the cost of public schools, more so than any state in the nation, and they know that the state’s over-reliance on property taxes hurts the children in the poorest districts the most.

Yet despite knowing that the amount the state contributes in per pupil spending is the lowest of any state in the union, GOP legislators voted to siphon off $24.8 million of this limited pool of funding to underwrite Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs), a voucher plan they promoted as a way for lower income parents to enroll their children in programs that were more suitable than public school. But, as the GOP legislators well know, over 70% of the EFA funds went to parents whose children were already enrolled in private or religious schools or in homeschooling.

Most importantly, the GOP legislators know that in the ConVal lawsuit, the most recent one brought by property poor communities, presiding Judge Ruoff called for the Legislature to increase the state’s adequacy aid from $4,100 per pupil to $7,356 per pupil. This increase would require the state to raise an additional $538 million per year. Cutting the salary of 72 superintendents by $25,000 would raise $1.8 million and cutting DEI administrators would raise far less. The yawning difference between these savings and the amount the state needs to raise to provide adequate funding cannot be depicted on a bar graph.

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Some financial data regarding state funding for schools, however, could be depicted on bar graphs. For example, one graph could depict the amount of state funding each district would receive in 2025-26 if the Legislature provided districts with the court-ordered $7,356 per pupil and contrasted that with another graph displaying the final figure in the state budget. Another set of graphs could depict how much state funding each district lost to EFAs by illustrating the funds that went to families of students who were previously enrolled in private schools, the amount that went to families who were previously home schooling, and the amount that went to students whose families were well above the federal poverty level.

By requiring districts to display the charts called for in this bill, the GOP legislators hope that voters will choke on a gnat and swallow a camel. Administrator and DEI pay is, at most, a $3 million gnat. The amount needed to cover the costs of unjust inequities in school funding, $538 million, is the camel. Students and parents in property poor districts have sought additional funding for years. Charts won’t help them hire more teachers or pay teachers higher salaries. Nor will cuts in administrative pay or the elimination of DEI.

Wayne Gersen is a retired school adminstrator. He lives in Etna.