5 things to know about local teacher pay

Our story on teacher pay and retention drew a lot of interest, but some people found the salaries chart of 45 school districts hard to analyze. Here are some quick facts to make it more digestible, pulled from the actual teacher contracts of local school districts.

1. The transfer “penalty”

For the vast majority of teachers, once you’ve worked in a school district for 10 years, it makes no financial sense to leave. That’s because if you switch districts, you can’t come in higher than a 10th-year teacher’s salary. In some districts, it’s even lower, with only five or seven years’ experience transferring. Northridge and Tecumseh are among the few local districts that let teachers transfer in at their real experience level.

>> RELATED: How teacher pay gaps affect area schools

>> RELATED: Chart showing differences in teacher pay

Centerville schools have another version of the transfer penalty. Centerville offers sizeable raises once teachers reach 15, 19, 23, 27 and 31 years of experience … but only for experience earned inside the district. So a veteran teacher who transfers into the district from outside has to start at Step 7. He or she gets raises the next six years, but then could go eight or nine years without a raise until hitting the first longevity step, in that teacher’s 15th year in Centerville.

2. Highest pay

Northridge Schools and the Miami Valley Career Tech Center were the only two districts that ranked in the top seven of our 45 districts for teacher salary at all seven points we analyzed (including starting, mid-career and late-career salaries).

Centerville just missed that category, ranking in the top seven at every point except starting salary with a bachelor’s degree, where it ranked 11th.

Kettering (17th) and Beavercreek (31st) are lower in starting salary, but gradually climb to the top levels by mid- and end-career benchmarks. Mad River’s starting salaries are in the top five, and its late-career totals drop just slightly to about 10th.

Oakwood’s teacher contract doesn’t have a traditional salary schedule. It does list starting salaries for new first through 10th-year teachers, and those salaries are among the area’s top six at each point.

But once teachers are in the district, salaries are based mainly on an evaluation process. That means, technically, there’s no ceiling on what an Oakwood teacher could earn, but there aren’t any guaranteed raises either.

3. Lowest pay

Jefferson Twp. Local Schools, a tiny district of 450 students just west of Dayton, has the lowest teacher pay of the 45 districts we analyzed — and they’re lowest on every step of the scale. The salary listed in Jefferson’s contract for a 28th-year teacher with a master’s degree is roughly the same as what a 28-year-OLD with a master’s would make in Northridge.

Small rural districts Greeneview, Bradford and New Lebanon were consistently in the bottom eight of the 45 districts, as was Tecumseh, a slightly larger district in New Carlisle.

Some larger districts were near the bottom of the local pay scale — only for teachers at certain points of their careers. Fairborn, Middletown and Springfield are in the bottom 10 for starting salary. Vandalia-Butler has solid starting and ending salaries, but is in the bottom 10 for 10th-year teachers, because teachers get fewer raises in their early years.

And Dayton’s starting salary is above average, but raises are lighter, meaning that by the end of their careers, Dayton teachers are in the bottom 10 of the 45 local districts.

4. Freezing, unfreezing pay

Step raises are annual raises based on number of years of experience, or raises tied to achieving a new education level (master’s degree, etc.). Many school districts “froze” step increases for employees for a few years during the recession or during more recent financial hard times.

But several districts have since had “catch-up years” where they gave larger raises, to put teachers back where they would have been on the scale without the freeze.

Mad River made up its 2012-13 freeze this year. Bellbrook teachers were able to make up as many as three frozen steps in 2014-15, with the tradeoff of getting no steps in 2015-16. Troy, Milton-Union and Beavercreek are among other districts to make up steps recently. Kettering teachers never made up the frozen step raises from 2011-13.

5. Contract odds and ends

Miami East is the only district where the contract ties future raises to the fiscal health of the general fund. Raises for 2017-18 and 2018-19 could be 0.0, 0.5 or 1.0 percent depending on the fund balance.

Bellbrook's contract calls for teachers to get a 1 percent bonus as long as the district gets an A or B on the state report card.

In Brookville and Wayne Local, the school board pays a small part of the teachers' 13 percent retirement contribution. Brookville pays the first 2 percentage points (almost one-sixth of the contribution), and Wayne Local pays the first 3 percentage points.

Multiple districts offer a bonus (usually $5,000 to $10,000) for teachers who retire as soon as they're eligible.

New Lebanon teachers don't get a base raise this year or next, but they get a 4 percent stipend each year. Some other districts have done this in the past to give their teachers some extra pay, without the compounding effect of adding the amount to their base salary.

The Montgomery County ESC offers a $600 incentive payment for teachers who use zero sick or personal days. The incentive drops to $400 for teachers who use one day, and $200 for teachers who use two.

Tipp City schools are nowhere in our chart. For years, they were the only local school district where the teachers were not unionized. That changed last year, but the union and the district are still trying to work out their first contract.

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