1/1/09

Suburban News

Lisa Aurand

* Westerville’s special efforts for its lowest income students doesn’t directly translate into teacher salaries, district leaders say.

A report released last week cast a harsh light on Westerville City Schools.

Data from a report by a group called The Education Trust showed that Westerville teachers at the elementary school with the most low-income students get paid $7,176 less a year, on average, than their counterparts at the school that serves the fewest low-income children.

Of the 14 largest Ohio districts, that’s the biggest gap, according to the report, which relies on 2006 data from the Ohio Department of Education.

Commissioned by The Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit policy institute that advocates for closing student achievement gaps, the report says the disparity can be an indication that districts aren’t directing state and federal funding for low income schools to the right places.

The difference in salaries can be accounted for by realizing that more experienced, better-paid teachers have greater ability to choose where they teach.

“Higher-paid veteran teachers often choose to teach in schools with more-affluent students, perhaps believing these schools pose fewer difficult challenges,” the report says. “When these teachers move to such schools, their larger salaries follow them, and the positions they vacate … are often filled with less experienced — and thus lower-paid — teachers.”

Westerville officials, however, were quick to point out that salary amounts don’t tell the whole story of what’s happening in the district’s lowest income elementary schools.

“We don’t purposely assign teachers … based on experience,” said Chris Wanner, chief of administrative services. “It was probably just more of a chance that the salaries came out that way.”

Though the Westerville Education Association contract does allow teachers the opportunity to request transfers to other buildings, it’s not a frequent occurrence, he said.

“We don’t have that many transfers,” he said. “They normally would stay at that particular building (where they were hired).”

Six district elementary schools are eligible for federal Title I funds based on the number of children from economically disadvantaged families that attend them. This year, Whittier and Cherrington joined Hawthorne, Huber Ridge, Pointview and Annehurst elementary schools on that list.

“I think the really important information that is not being told in that story, includes the level of support for the students in (those) buildings, ” said Chief of Academic Affairs Diane Conley.

Because Title I funds must be used for additional staff or programming and can’t be used to pay for already-created teacher positions or pre-existing programs, just three teacher salaries are paid for partially with federal dollars, Conley said.

“That’s been a focus — not only of the district dollars — but also of the federal dollars for the last four years.”

Those three positions drive down class size at Title I schools, and the report acknowledges that class sizes at the highest poverty elementary school in Westerville are, on average 4.61 students smaller than classes at the lowest-poverty school.

That’s not the case everywhere. In Olentangy City Schools, class sizes at the highest poverty elementary school are slightly bigger than those at the lowest poverty school.

A final redeeming point: Westerville spends $559 more per student on teacher salaries in its highest poverty school than it does in it’s lowest poverty school — the most of all 14 districts examined. And that extra money comes from the district, not from federal funds.

Instead of funding salaries, Westerville Title I funds pay for reading and math intervention specialists and staff development at those six buildings, Conley said.

“In most of those buildings, it pays for the reading teacher,” she said. “Other differences include the summer program for kids coming into kindergarten (at Huber Ridge). We use those dollars for support and we use district dollars to pay salaries.”

Just because a teacher is in his or her first few years of teaching doesn’t mean they’re not some of the best teachers available, Conley said. And Westerville has a mentoring program that pairs new teachers with veterans, she said.

The district will release a public response to the report in the next few days, Conley said on Monday, Dec. 29.