Competition drives RBHS teacher salaries

Next year a new teacher at Riverside-Brookfield High School fresh out of college with a bachelor’s degree and no experience will make $49,134 under the new five year contract approved by the District 208 School Board last week.

While that might seem like a generous starting salary for someone with no experience, that is the market RB is competing in.

At Lyons Township High School, the same teacher with a bachelor’s degree and no experience starts out at $49,694, and at Oak Park and River Forest High School (OPRF) the new grad will be making $49,206, according to salary schedules provided by the schools.

However, a new teacher at RB next year would make more than he would at New Trier High School where his starting salary would be $47,589, according to a salary schedule provided by New Trier.

“No one claims you have to run a food line for teachers anymore,” said District 208 School Board President Larry Herbst. “We still are competing with the LTs and OPRFs for teachers.”

By the end of the new five-year contract at RB that new hire will be making, assuming he or she takes no additional coursework, $66,064, an average annual increase of 6.9 percent.

How is that possible under a contract that increases base salaries by an average annual amount of 2.78 percent over five years?

Welcome to the mystery of “step.”

Almost all teacher contracts provide automatic increases as an employee gains seniority. At RB, and at almost every other public and most private high school, teachers are paid by both experience and education.

Teachers with more education are paid more. There are six different salary lanes, such as BA, BA +15, MA, MA + 15, MA + 30 and MA + 45. Within each lane there are steps, each step corresponding to a year. The numbers refer to the graduate coursework hours teachers have taken past their degree.

There are 10 steps in the two BA lanes and 20 steps in the MA lanes. By the fifth year of the contract, each time you advance a step means a 4-percent increase in salary.

In the first few years of the contract, some step increases are more than 4 percent and some are less. This is because the negotiators tried to boost the salaries of more experienced teachers rather than less-experienced teachers because it is among the more experienced teachers that RB salaries tend to lag in comparison to the competition, or at least at LT.

For example a teacher with a master’s degree and 10 years of experience will make $75,995 while that teacher would make $81,001 at LT. At New Trier that teacher would make $77,190. At OPRF that teacher would make $75,284.

Not all teachers receive step increases. At RB, step increases end after 20 years of teaching. At that point, teachers only receive the increases in the base contract.

For example a teacher with a master’s and 20 years of experience is making $104,028 this year at RB. Next year that teacher will make $107,928, for a raise of only 3.7 percent.

Currently there 24.5 teaching positions out of the total of 110.7 positions at RB are beyond step increases, according to Chris Whelton, the business manager at RB.

The Chicago suburbs are a very competitive market when it comes to teacher salaries.

“We are in one of the most expensive high school teacher markets in the nation,” said James Marciniak, the head of the school board’s personnel committee. “We need to be competitive for teacher talent, but we need to be fiscally responsible.”

Private school teachers make considerably less than the public school counterparts. At Fenwick High School, for example, a beginning teacher with bachelor’s degree will make $34,555 next year, according to Dr. James Quaid, the principal of Fenwick.

A Fenwick teacher with a masters and 10 years experience will make $48,229 next year, Quaid said. The highest salary at Fenwick, for someone with a Ph.D. and 22 years experience is $71,770.

RB’s current three-year contract awarded annual increases 5 percent per year, not counting steps increases. That was intended to push RB into the upper third of its peer districts. The new contract was designed to just maintain RB’s position, Herbst and Marciniak said.

RB Superintendent/Principal Jack Baldermann, who sat in on the negotiations, said that he was happy with the contract.

“It was a very smooth negotiation process,” said Baldermann. “It’s a very fair contract, fair to our excellent teachers and also fair to our extremely supportive and high quality community. We protected the financial interests of the district and at the same time we’ve been very fair to a very hard working, unbelievably compassionate group of professionals.”