By T. Scott Boatright
After moving to tweaking supplemental pay distribution during a special-called meeting last week, the Lincoln Parish School will be doing much consideration of its future in upcoming weeks and months.
A compensation study by LEAN Frog Consulting, an Alabama firm hired to do an evaluation of the Lincoln Parish Schools District recommended the tweaks last week and found that while the district provides competitive compensation for its employees overall, it has also created disadvantages for support staff, part-time workers and others.
The LEAN Frog study compared Lincoln Parish’s teacher pay to 10 other regional school systems, finding that new teachers entering Lincoln Parish would receive a starting pay that’s at least in the top three among those competitors.
But the study also found that as teachers’ time in the system continues over years, Lincoln Parish offers smaller increases year over year than some other districts, with a number of district positions eventually falling to sixth or seventh place in the report’s compensation rankings.
And while total compensation for most full-time support staff ranks above average compared to other regional districts, the Lincoln Parish pay schedules for many of these positions provide a salary growth of only 10% or less throughout an employee’s career, significantly below LEAN Frog’s recommended range of 30-50%.
“If you think about over a long period of time, 25 years on the job, and you’re only getting a total of less than 10% change (in pay), that doesn’t seem quite right,” Lead LEAN Frog Consultant Chasitie White told the LPSB.
That obviously isn’t a good thing in a day and age where statewide, including Lincoln Parish, Louisiana is still facing teacher shortages and struggling to retain employees on a long-term basis.
So now Lincoln Parish Schools officials will review and discuss LEAN Frog’s recommendations to eliminate these inequities in hopes of creating a 30-50% growth throughout the careers of all its employees while also raising part-time hourly rates up to the same level as full-time employees.
Currently, salaried paraprofessionals in Lincoln Parish receive an average of $17.79 an hour while part-time paras average $15 an hour for the same job. Full-time employees also receive sales tax-fueled supplemental pay while part-timers do not.
Following is the list of recommendations LEAN Frog presented to the LPSB in order to try and make the school district more competitive with others in the region:
- Update support salary schedule methodology to be more standardized where base salaries are set and vary only according to experience and degree within the schedule. The first step is to include skill increments into the schedules to align with longevity pay at peer districts.
- Continue 13th and 14th checks but include the majority of the 13th and 14th check amounts in regular monthly pay in order to better align monthly pay with market and peer rates. (The LPSB passed a motion to do so during Friday’s special-called meeting)
- Conduct an Organizational Review to review each department’s performance, staffing, etc,
- Define and build a Maintenance career ladder structure and align rates with skills to be more competitive with peer and market averages.
- Redesign leadership schedules:
- Based on Organization Review Findings, move to a title-based pay structure for leadership, First align positions as defined by duties/responsibilities, then assign appropriate leadership titles and salary accordingly.
‘• Develop leadership schedules with an index from Teacher daily rates.
- Review elementary leadership structure to determine the need for a defined Elementary Assistant Principal position/schedule.
- Annual increases would be applied to the base Teacher schedule and adjusted for leadership schedules by the index of the daily rates.
- Over time, increase the number of steps with increases and expand schedules to a 30% to 50% salary range by increasing step values.
- Consider moving part-time flat hourly rates to the same hourly pay schedule as the “salaried” positions.
- Increase substitute pay to the $90 per day for non-degreed and $100 per day for 4-year degreed substitutes to compete with peer rates. (The LPSB passed a motion to do so during Friday’s special-called meeting)
