Last spring I was named the founding principal of St. Michael Catholic High School, a new Catholic high school located in Fairhope, Al, part of the Archdiocese of Mobile. I began work in July of 2015, and our first day of classes will be in August, 2016.
It’s been thrilling to design a school from “scratch,” and I’ve been blessed with excellent support from the archdiocese and the broader community. But it’s also been an occasion for me to be reflective about things we principals often take as “givens,” be they bell schedules, the classes we require, the extracurriculars we offer, and as will be the topic of this article, HOW we structure our pay scales and salaries.
Let me begin with this general observation about us concerning salaries: We principals often draw the lines too firmly, unwilling to offer an outstanding faculty prospect a few extra thousand dollars to secure his or her place on our faculty, or to retain an excellent teacher who needs more. Our most important expenses are salaries, and our most important assets are excellent teachers. We can try and hire “on the cheap,” but the reality is, for every mediocre teacher on our faculty, we end up losing tens of thousands of dollars in tuition dollars in the long run, as unhappy or uninspired students leave us, or as a mediocre reputation dampens enthusiasm for admissions. Making PURELY an economic argument (and setting aside, for the moment, the profound difference a gifted teacher can make in young peoples’ lives), we are too often “a penny wise and a pound foolish” in our hiring and retention practices.
But often, this “mistake” is hardwired into our salary charts. I have challenged the very idea of salary charts elsewhere, because they too often hamstring us from hiring people at the salaries we need to get them. But if we must have salary charts, we should create them such that they help us retain our best teachers (or attract high end teachers), and this means, I believe, having salary scales with the greatest range possible between starting salaries and the veterans: austere on the front end, but generous on the back. Our 15+ year veterans are presumably the pillars of our school (if they’re not, we don’t have a salary issue as much as a performance evaluation issue). I believe they should be making 25,000+ dollars more than our first year teachers. If they are, every year (or every couple of years, depending on how we choose to do it), we can give these teachers a sizable bump in salaries, recognizing their growing importance to our school. Too often, however, we keep the ranges so narrow that our annual raises barely keep pace with inflation, and almost certainly do NOT keep pace with the increasing expenses of a young person, who may begin with us as a single person, but then marry and have children. He or she may be deeply committed to our mission, but there are bills to pay and mouths to feed.
There’s another reason a wider range salary scale is better: It’s usually cheaper. If my starting salary is relatively high but my 20+ salaries are relatively low, I’ve tilted the “average” salary up, since the statistics say the majority of our faculty will be with us less than 10-12 years. But if I am paying excellent wages to my most long-standing teachers, who represent a smaller fraction of my faculty, and if I am keeping starting salaries as low as possible, then my “average” salary will be less.
For illustrative purposes, let’s look at two fictional schools, A and B, each with 20 faculty. Both schools have 7 (35%) of their faculty as “level 1” (1-5) years, 7 (35%) as “level 2” (6-10) years, 4 (20%) as “level 3” (11-15 years) and 2 (10%) “level 4” (16+ years). Though every faculty is different, this would not be an entirely unusual Catholic school breakdown per 20 faculty.
School A, however, has a narrow range of salaries, with a starting salary of 38,000 and 53,000 for 15+ teachers. School B has a wider range, with a starting salary of 33,000 and a high end of 58,000. For the sake of this illustration, let us assume that salaries increase each year in both schools in a linear fashion, meaning they go up equal amounts from level 1, to 2, etc. So in school A, the increments would be $5,000 as one moved up the levels, whereas for school B, the increments would be $8,333.
What is the total cost of salaries? In school A (7 * 38,000) + (7 * 43000) + (4* 48000) + (2* 53000) = a total salary of 865,000. In school B, (7* 33000) + (7*41333) + 4 * (49666) + (2* 58000) = a total salary of 838,995. School B pays out $26,000 less in salaries, even while it gives each of its teachers a bigger salary increase each year. It’s a “win—win” for both the school and employee—a happy instance where philosophy and practicality marry for the common good of all.
And now, a few qualifications:
These numbers don’t work, of course, if a school is comprised of predominantly long term teachers. But that’s a relatively rare phenomena—consider yourself blessed if you have that “problem”! But I’ll add this: ask yourself if those longer term faculty are among your best teachers, or to put it differently, if your performance evaluation of faculty each year is sufficiently challenging as to weed out the average teachers as the years go by. Better teaching ought to be expectation for our longer serving faculty, given that they have been able to hone their craft over the years, but often, we give our longer serving teachers a pass.
These numbers also don’t hold if a school is unable to attract good teachers at the lower starting salary. In my example, if school B can’t find good beginning teachers at 33,000, then it’ll have to pay more. But there’s good news on that front: Having just accepted over 175 applications for 15 teaching slots as we begin a new school at St. Michael, I can tell you it’s a “buyer’s market.” Plus, as I have written elsewhere, if it’s necessary to sweeten the pot to get a hard to find position, consider giving a young person a signing bonus rather than raise beginning salaries across the board. Signing bonuses are one time payments.
“Be wise as serpents, and gentle as doves,” Jesus commanded. May we be given wisdom to lead our schools well.
