By Bob Peryea
CORRESPONDENT
On Feb. 11 the Badger High School Board took a step that others school boards have delayed: the Board voted to put into place an employee handbook that involved little input from the teaching staff. The new handbook contains significant changes to the educators’ terms of employment.
“(We’re) trying to balance (finances) to keep education where it needs to be,” School Board President Patrick Sherman said.
“We were hoping to work collaboratively,” said Ed Krien, president-elect of the Badger Professional Association, the local teachers’ union.
The BPA is not affiliated with any statewide or national union.
Increase in the workload
Each teacher will be required to carry six sections of classes without additional compensation. Until Monday night, teachers were required to carry five sections. They were able to opt for a sixth section, for which they were compensated $4,600 per year.
As part of the compromises settled at during conversations with teachers’ representatives, all teachers who opted to carry a sixth section this year will receive a permanent increase to their base salary of $1,000 per year. About 75 percent of the teachers had opted to the additional section this year. For them, this change reflects an effective $3,600 reduction in salary with the same workload.
Teachers that did not volunteer for the sixth section this year will receive no salary increase next year.
The anticipated savings to the school is approximately $250,000 per year.
Significant retirement changes
“We’ve had it very good until now,” Krien said. He noted that all of that changed with passage of the new handbook.
According to the handbook, any teacher who is over 55 years old and has over 20 years of service at Badger High School will receive the original retirement package.
Teachers that are younger than 55 years old or have less than 20 years of service will see their retirement package cut significantly.
All retiring teachers until now received extended salary and health care coverage. Under the new handbook, that coverage has been drastically reduced.
One personal day
The only other change identified after the teachers’ had a meeting with a couple of Board members was the addition of a single personal day.
“Administrators receive that same single personal day,” said Sherman, “And they work an additional two months out of the year.”
By contrast with the private sector, McDonald’s managers receive 5 personal days after a single year of service and each year are resupplied with 5 personal days.
The budget in Madison
The School Board took this action in anticipation of Governor Walker’s biennial budget, which is expected to be released in full this week.
“We don’t know how much the state’s per student support will be,” Sherman said. “If there is no increase, we need these changes to balance the budget. We are using the tools Governor Walker gave us in Act 10.”
Acts 10 and 32 are the controversial state employee reform bills that lead to massive protests in Madison two years ago and the unsuccessful recall against Walker.
In a moment of irony, State Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca and union representatives from the state teachers’ union and employees’ union were speaking in Elkhorn at the Democratic Party office at the same time as the School Board meeting.
“This is all reversible,” Barca told the audience of about 70 people. “Act 10 is not done going through the court system.”
Because of the uncertainty of the ultimate fate of Act 10, some school districts have opted not to completely re-form their employee relations’ standards.
At Big Foot High School in Walworth, “The BFHS Board of Education and the BFHS Educators have a MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) that is in effect until June 30, 2013. We will hold to this document. At the appropriate time, the Board will revisit the next MOU,” Ann Zubow, Board President for the Big Foot High School Board said in an email to the Times.
TIDs and the school
During the meeting, several Board members pointed to the ongoing existence of Tax Increment Districts or TIDs in Lake Geneva and Genoa City as a cause for part of their financial woes.
In the 1970’s, the state created Tax Incremental Financing or TIF districts that allowed local cities and towns to rehabilitate downtrodden areas of their towns.
The base concept is that in a TID, all taxes paid within the district are applied to paying debts for projects designed to improve the district.
A large portion of the downtown area of Lake Geneva is in a TID. For example, since the TID in Lake Geneva has existed for so long, the Cove Condominium Hotel and associated restaurant have never paid any taxes to support the high school. All the taxes paid by that facility and others have gone to improvements such as streetlights and parking meters.
Several members of the School Board mentioned the impact that this has on school funding.
“There is a TID in Genoa City, as well,” Sherman said. He pointed out that under new rules passed at the state level, cities and towns could extend TIDs nearly indefinitely. This has the ultimate impact of reducing the effective tax base for schools.
The Handbook
The Wisconsin School Board Association has created a sample handbook that schools can use as a template.
In response to an inquiry by Lake Geneva Times, Barry Forbes of the association indicated that they could not supply the newspaper with a copy of their sample handbook.
“We sell it to school districts. It’s available only to our members,” Forbes said.
According to Sherman, the handbook used by Badger High School was not drawn from the The Wisconsin School Board Association handbook.
“There are, of course, similarities,” he said. “But only because some sections are based on laws that are standard.”
“We haven’t even seen a final version of the Handbook,” Krien said in a statement to the School Board.
As of press time, the Badger High School Employee Handbook was not made available to the Times.
