Part 5 in a series of Act 10 success stories

MADISON, Wis. – Can you imagine running a business, recognizing an obvious problem, and having little or no power to address it?

That was the situation facing public school administrators throughout Wisconsin for decades, during the heyday of teachers unions and collective bargaining.

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Administrators could propose very logical, necessary changes, but often they could not be implemented without union consent.

That tended to be a problem, because the unions oppose most school reforms that would clearly benefit students. And in the past, when they did allow changes to occur, they usually managed to trade their consent for extra salary or bonuses.

Luckily that nightmare scenario passed into history in 2011, with the passage of Gov. Scott Walker’s historic Act 10. The landmark legislation limited teachers union collective bargaining to salary only, setting administrators free to make changes they believe are best for students.

The unions may not like the changes, but they no longer have the power to stop them.

Many districts did a lot of necessary housecleaning of common policies they’ve wanted to dump for years, including the union-preferred “last in, first out” rule for layoffs and personnel decisions, and teacher pay scales based solely on years of experience and college credits earned.

But school leaders have also been able to make more pressing changes that immediately address challenges in their schools.

Better use of taxpayer dollars

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Administrators from the Neenah school district jumped at the opportunity to make fundamental changes under Act 10.

One was implementing an insurance buyout program for teachers and other employees who are covered by outside health insurance and have no need for school coverage.

The district imposed a program that compensates those employees $2,000 per year in lieu of insurance. Thus far the program has saved the district approximately $500,000 per year during a period of high budget stress, according to Dr. Mary Pfeiffer, superintendent of Neenah schools.

The school board tried to implement such a program during collective bargaining in the past, but the teachers union wouldn’t hear of it, according to Pfeiffer. While Pfeiffer isn’t sure why union officials refused, she assumes that they wanted the insurance savings reinvested in teacher salaries.

Pfeiffer believes the savings should be invested in student programs, and that’s what the district is doing now that it’s in full control.

“If we can offer great insurance and still save money, I feel strongly that any savings should go back and benefit kids instead of going into a salary pool,” Pfeiffer told EAGnews.

Neenah officials are also a year away from possibly lowering the salary of some teachers. Such a move would have been unthinkable during the heyday of collective bargaining.

Individual salaries only increased when the union called the shots, regardless of a teacher’s performance.

As Pfeiffer explains, “We just completed our first year of our new salary schedule, and we found that in some cases some employees were making significantly higher salaries than their level of performance would support.”

That happens because teachers work their way up the union salary scale, which is based on seniority and college credits earned. That means a longtime teacher with mediocre skills could reach the top level of the scale and make significantly more than a far superior teacher with less seniority.

Pfeiffer wants to fix that, so there is enough money available to properly compensate and retain the best teachers, regardless of their length of service. But the salary cuts won’t begin for another year, so teachers will have two full years to adjust their performance if necessary.

“We didn’t feel we should start this new process and start taking money away right away,” she said. “They will have one more year to justify their salary level. In all fairness to them, they were involved in a flawed system they did not create.”

Officials in the Oshkosh district saved about $350,000 per year by eliminating salary increases for graduate college credits that teachers earned in their non-working hours.

Numerous studies have concluded that teachers with advanced degrees are no more effective in the classroom than teachers with basic bachelor degrees.

“In the past, teachers could take whatever grad classes they wanted to and get credit for it on the salary schedule,” Mike Nault, human resources director for the Oshkosh district, told EAGnews. “In the future we would like to (bring back and) restructure this program so it’s more meaningful.”

Trying to make such a change in the past would have drawn great resistance from the teachers union, according to Nault. The union would have insisted on having the money that was saved passed back to teachers in some other form, he said.

Schedule changes benefit students in Brown Deer district

Administrators in the Brown Deer district also imposed several fundamental changes under Act 10, mostly related to the amount of time teachers spend with students.

In the past Brown Deer high school teachers were only instructing five out of eight class hours during the school day. The district was facing a budget deficit of more than $1 million at the time.

After Act 10 was passed, Brown Deer officials quickly changed the policy so teachers were in front of a class for six of the eight hours per day. The move saved the district about $200,000 per year, and more importantly, put the best teachers in front of students on a more consistent basis, according to Dr. Deb Kerr, the district superintendent.

The retirement of 11 teachers at the end of the 2010-11 school year made the change possible without layoffs, Kerr said.

Officials had been discussing the change with the teachers union for some time, but nothing had been finalized, according to Kerr.

“Act 10 put finality to it,” Kerr told EAGnews. “We didn’t have to drag the conversation on any more. This is better for kids. High quality teachers are what make schools great.”

The district imposed other schedule changes, as well.

Teachers said they needed more time to work together, so a half hour was added to the schedule in the morning for teacher meeting time.

That stretched the teacher work day from 8 to 8 1/2 hours. In the past such a move probably would have drawn demands for extra pay from the union, but the school couldn’t afford it, and under Act 10 the union had no leverage.

“I think the union had some concerns about this,” Kerr said. “There were additional hours added without additional pay. I can’t really say if teachers were happy about it, but they understand the importance of working together.”

Administrators also did away with a union contract provision that required elementary teachers must be paid overtime if they worked more than 300 minutes per day. They had tried in the past to remove the rule, but the union never gave in.

“We’re here to work with kids,” Kerr said. “We didn’t want to have to count minutes. With all the mandates and all the new things we have to teach kids, it was not a good way to run a school.”