County considers teacher incentives

By Barney Breen-Portnoy

Published: May 22, 2008

The rewards and difficulties of offering teachers merit pay — and ways to get good teachers where they’re most needed — were hashed over by Albemarle school officials Thursday, with two School Board members signaling a willingness to pay more for better instruction.

School Board Chairman Brian Wheeler and board member Jon Stokes both seemed open to differential pay options, such as performance-based bonuses, even if those options end up increasing the amount of money spent on teacher compensation.

“Looking at it from a business perspective, I’d be willing to pay more money for compensation if the compensation scheme pays for better performance,” Stokes said.

Discussion participants at a work session Thursday said that teacher performance could be assessed through student achievement. SOL results and data gathered by the SchoolNet information management system are potential ways to measure student achievement.

The fairness to teachers of using SOL results, however, is questionable, some participants said, given that students may have little motivation to pass SOL tests.

“The idea of using tests as a measurement tool is wrong from the get-go,” board member Pam Moynihan said. “As long as I have been on the board, we have not used that as a criteria of evaluation.”

Alison Dwier-Selden, the principal of Yancey Elementary School, talked about the difficulty of hiring and retaining teachers given that Yancey is located in the far southern corner of the county, far from highly populated areas.

The current teacher compensation model used by the county is a step system in which teachers earn salary increases based on longevity. A rookie teacher with a bachelor’s degree will earn a $41,947 base salary this year. A 15-year veteran will earn $51,510, and a 30-year veteran will earn $62,954.

As part of the compensation strategy adopted by the School Board and Board of Supervisors in March 2004, the school system aims to offer teacher salaries in the top quartile of its adopted competitive market, which includes neighboring school divisions and other school divisions in Virginia of similar size.

Another work session group looked at retirement and retention strategies.

According to board member Barbara Massie Mouly, older teachers seem generally content with the school division’s current retirement system, which includes three components — the Virginia Retirement System, the Voluntary Early Retirement Incentive Program and the county retirement bonus.

Many young teachers, however, have little interest in the retirement system, Mouly said, because they do not plan to spend their entire working lives in the teaching profession because of financial, lifestyle and stress reasons.