Miami teachers to vote on new starting salary, but veteran teachers don’t get more

A whole school year and more than a dozen bargaining sessions later, the Miami-Dade County school district and the teachers union have agreed on a contract with a $47,500 starting salary for teachers, but it compresses the base pay of mid-career educators who will hardly make more than a brand new teacher.

Now it’s the teaching workforce’s turn to ratify the contract or not. Teachers and all 30,000 school employees represented in the United Teachers of Dade’s bargaining unit have until 5 p.m. Friday to cast their ballots online, though many still hadn’t received their credentials to vote as of late Wednesday. One teacher, who complained via email that she hadn’t received her PIN to vote, got a message back that her vote had been recorded.

UTD President Karla Hernandez-Mats called the contract “creative” and “all inclusive.” It raises the starting salaries — and the base pay of all teachers — from $41,000 to $47,500, the figure Gov. Ron DeSantis has promised since he declared 2020 to be the “year of the teacher.”

DeSantis’ promise relied on a bill he signed into law Wednesday. The state allocated $500 million — $400 million to raise the minimum salary in districts statewide and $100 million to raise pay of veteran teachers and other instructional personnel. Miami-Dade’s cut, after sharing with charter schools, is $47.5 million, according to Hernandez-Mats.

That funding was officially made available to the school district — and district and union negotiators avoided returning to the bargaining table — at the governor’s press conference Wednesday at Mater Academy Charter School in Hialeah Gardens.

The downside, however, is that Miami-Dade’s distribution of base pay for teachers has been compressed. Teachers who have been working for as long as 16 years are making a base salary of up to $300 more than a brand new teacher who would start this fall.

That compression has drawn criticism from beleaguered mid-career teachers who already lost guaranteed step-scale pay raises worth thousands years ago. There is a movement led by those aggrieved teachers calling for their colleagues to vote no on the contract.

Caught in the middle

Joshua Paolino, a TV and film magnet teacher and union steward at South Miami Middle, is working with a small group of teachers called Rank and File Educators of Miami. They released a statement outlining what they say should be fixed in the contract.

Paolino will start his 18th year of teaching in the fall but will only make $250 more than a brand new teacher. He supports raising the starting salary and taking care of late-career educators whose last years teaching count the most toward their retirement but said mid-career teachers are once again left out.

“While that’s understandable, they’re not focusing on those in the middle, which is a pretty substantial part of the membership,” Paolino said. “Find a way to make those people a little bit more whole so we don’t have to wait until the last five years of our careers to essentially make a livable wage in this county.”

Some teachers are also frustrated that the school year concluded without a contract and annual, regularly negotiated raises. Instead of a raise in base pay that counts toward retirement, returning teachers will receive a 2.5% lump sum stipend upon returning to work in the fall. Teachers who retired this year will not qualify for that stipend.

Funding that would’ve been used for those incremental raises was allotted to clerical workers and school security monitors. Because they do not qualify for referendum dollars approved by voters in 2018, they would receive a 3% pay raise under this contract. They also do not qualify to receive money under DeSantis’ plan.

Teacher pay formula

The district and the union agreed to blend referendum dollars for teachers with state funding for pay supplements ranging from 2% to 4.38% for the upcoming 2020-21 school year. Funding from that four-year referendum, approved overwhelmingly by voters and funded by an additional property tax, will expire in 2023.

The district will likely put the referendum back on the ballot for renewal, though it is facing legal challenges from charter schools which want a cut of the funding.

“If it was not for the community we would be in a dire situation here,” said Hernandez-Mats. “[Teachers] would feel that they are being devalued and disrespected.”

Asked about the grievances of mid-career teachers, she said, “We should definitely tell them to contact state lawmakers and governor.”

“If we only did what the mandate told us to, everyone would’ve been $47,500,” she explained, calling House Bill 641 an unfunded mandate. “We make those small increases to differentiate them, [because] how would we determine a first-year teacher versus a 10-year teacher versus 15-year teacher. They’re placeholders so we know [who has] more years of experience.”

Sonia Diaz, a spokeswoman for the union, said the credentials for the ratification vote started to be sent out to teachers via email in batches at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday. She said the pipeline to send those emails is small, and emails had to be sent out in smaller batches.

Diaz said the 5,000 educators who haven’t received their credentials to vote yet should get them sometime Wednesday. Ratification vote results will be tallied and announced live via Zoom and Facebook Live at 5:15 p.m. on Friday.

This story was originally published June 24, 2020 at 2:14 PM.