NEWPORT — With teacher retention described as a “crisis,” the Newport School Board approved a one-time incentive payout for returning teachers and support staff in hopes it will help keep teachers in Newport.

The returning teachers and support staff who have been sent checks for $1,110, for a total of $118,000.

In addition, employees received $300 each for supplies, totaling another $28,200.

“I’m looking at this list of teachers we are losing and it scares me to death,” board member Kathryn Boutin said at the June 27 meeting when the board unanimously approved the incentive pay. Board member Darrell Jones was absent.

The district currently is advertising for 11 teaching positions at Richards Elementary School, and four each at the middle school and high school, Newport Superintendent Donna Magoon said this week.

“When completing the exit interview, the highest reason listed was salary,” Magoon said Monday in an email.

The incentive pay approval comes after Newport voters in March defeated the proposed budget, which included a $105,000 contract for support staff, and also rejected a separate warrant article of $373,000 for salary and benefit increases for teachers under an existing contract that would have given each teacher an additional $3,000.

The School Board had reopened the contract in hopes that better pay would help attract and retain more teachers.

Bert Spaulding, who resigned from the School Board earlier this year over a dispute about the budget review process, questioned whether his former colleagues on the board had the authority to pay the money to the teachers without a negotiation.

“It is not in the budget and there is nothing in the contract,” Spaulding said. “You cannot give the bargaining unit money outside of negotiations.”

Magoon said the district’s attorney told her the incentive pay was allowed so long as the money was paid out before the start of the new fiscal year that began July 1, which is why the district sent the checks on June 28.

Teacher retention is one of the most important pieces to improving education, Board Chairman Steve Morris said. But it is difficult when other districts pay $7,000 or more than what Newport teachers earn on average.

“You are not going to get loyalty out of people when they can make more up the road,” Morris said.

For the 2023-24 school year, the New Hampshire Department of Education lists the average salary in Newport at just over $49,000. This compares to Claremont at more than $57,000. Other neighboring districts, including Cornish ($58,460); Croydon ($55,000); Grantham ($72,000); and Fall Mountain ($59,700), all pay more than Newport. The average salary statewide is $67,100.

Except for Croydon, at $35,000, Newport also trails nearby districts with its minimum starting salary for a teacher of $37,379.

Claremont is about $42,000 with Cornish at $40,900 and Fall Mountain at $44,864, according to the Department of Education.

Lisa Ferrigno, co-chairwoman of the Newport Teachers Association, told the board at the June 27 meeting that the district is at a “crisis point.”

In the past year, the district has lost 30% of its teachers at Richards and half the middle school teachers, Ferrigno said.

This means “doubling up” some grades, which means more work for teachers and less time for individual instruction, building relationships and less time to address behavior, she said.

Going into the new school year, the district has no third grade team, only one fourth grade teacher for three classrooms and also needs a preschool teacher, music teacher and a librarian in addition to paraprofessionals, Ferrigno said.

“What will happen if we can’t fill those positions?” Ferrigno said.

A Newport High School graduate, Jay Page, focused on the turnover of music teachers in her comments to the board during a June 13 School Board meeting, according to the meeting minutes.

Newport has lost nine music educators in recent years because they are “pushed out” by students or “because they did not feel welcome,” Page said.

“Her concern is whether the next (music) teacher will have the same fate; the risk of being pushed out of the school district,” the board minutes said. “Ms. Page said she grew up in and graduated from Newport. She loves it. When she gets her teaching certification, will she want to deal with the abuse these teachers face?”

In addition to the incentive pay, the School Board also appropriated $70,000 in surplus for upgrades and repairs at Towle, which houses the SAU offices.

Magoon said downstairs will be for students who no longer attend the middle high school but will be kept in the district with a special academic program.

There also will be space in the building for students who have been given out-of-school suspension and an alternative program that will look to bring students who have stopped coming to school to return.

The decision received criticism from Ferrigno, of the Teachers Association.

“Now is not the time to build a state-of-the art classroom in a separate building for 12 students and one teacher,” Ferrigno said during the public comment portion of the June 27 meeting.

Other uses of the surplus include: a new water heater ($141,000) at the technical center, now being renovated, and $200,000 for the facilities department to make several repairs in the school buildings, including holes in the rooms in the middle high school ceilings that were the result of heating and ventilation repairs, Magoon said. Another $73,000 will be to repair leaks in some rooms at Richards Elementary.

SAU 43 Business Administrator Rob DiGregorio said the district will return about $386,000 of the nearly $940,000 projected surplus to the taxpayers.

Patrick O’Grady can be reached at pogclmt@gmail.com.