Miami-Dade school district asking people to pay more for teacher pay — or ‘bleak’ future
In May, the chief finance officer for Miami-Dade Schools warned of impending financial turmoil unless the district turns around its declining student enrollment and brings in more money.
“If we do not change at some point in the next few years, we are going to get to a point where it is difficult to recover, because we will have to start destroying the foundation of the school system,” Ron Steiger told members of a family and community involvement advisory subcommittee.
The message, seen in meeting minutes obtained by the Herald, came a few months before Steiger would again offer a similar warning — this time to School Board members during their Sept. 7 meeting. Before they adopted a $7 billion budget for the 2022-23 school year — a conversation that lasted less than one hour — he let board members know that while the district was closing out the current school year in a “strong financial position,” its financial situation “portends a dark potential future once the federal stimulus funds run out (and) even potentially earlier than that.”
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His remarks paint a picture of the district’s financial reality — increased costs, a decrease of state funding and a student population that has shrunk by about 6.75% over the last 10 years — ahead of a Nov. 8 referendum that will ask voters for a second time to boost their property taxes to fund teacher pay and school safety costs. Voters approved a tax hike in 2018 with more than 70% of the vote.
If approved, the measure would generate $400 million over four years.
At the same time, about $1.2 billion in federal stimulus funds the district received during the pandemic will run out in 2024, resulting in a “financial cliff” that officials, including Steiger, have cautioned about.
The referendum calls for increasing a homeowner’s property tax rate for schools from .75 to 1.0 — or $100 for every $100,000 in assessed taxable property value — for the next four years. That means a typical homeowner’s annual tax bill for schools would be $240, up from $168, based on a Miami-Dade home assessed at $265,682. The calculation is based on the assessed value of a property going up only 3%, per homesteaded property statutory limits.
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“There is nothing more important than (the) conversation we’re having about the vital, vital importance of ensuring the referendum passes in November,” Steiger warned School Board members at the Sept. 7 meeting. “It will have a drastic, drastic effect on the district’s finances.”
If it fails, he told the Herald in a late September interview, “the plan is very bleak.”
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Why the tax increase?
Though some have raised concern about asking voters to increase their property taxes amid skyrocketing costs of living, the district has defended its decision.
One reason is a new state law requiring districts to share a portion of their revenues — about 25% — with charter schools, the result of Miami-Dade Schools losing a court case earlier this year when the 3rd District Court of Appeals ruled that charter schools were eligible for such funding.
Additionally, they argue, the referendum is necessary to stay competitive with teacher salaries in neighboring districts. In August, for example, Broward County residents agreed to double their property taxes to support a referendum that will generate $267 million over four years to fund similar initiatives as Miami-Dade’s, including teacher pay.
If voters reject the measure, the district would lose $300 million — 88% of which goes to teacher compensation and the other 12% to safety and security — once the current referendum sunsets in June 2023, Steiger told the Herald. (The other $100 million is the charter school allocation.)
Moreover, teachers will see a 15-20% decrease in their supplemental pay, or what they make beyond their base salary.
At a town hall Monday, the first of 10 the district is hosting to raise awareness about the referendum, Superintendent Jose Dotres echoed similar concerns. In addition to potentially losing teachers, the district would also lose police officers to higher-paying agencies and there would be fewer student programs available, he said. (Since the 2018 referendum, the district has hired 290 resource officers, and each one is paid through the referendum funds. In total, the district’s police department employs 468 officers.)
“We will lose our ability to recruit and retain instructional personnel and great police officers. That is the bottom line,” Dotres said. “Our ability will be compromised. If our vacancies are concerning now, our vacancies will be even greater” should the referendum fail.
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Stimulus dollars will be going away
The referendum comes ahead of a separate financial issue facing the district: the end of federal stimulus dollars.
At the onset of the pandemic, when schools closed and districts scrambled to move teaching and learning online, officials used federal stimulus funds to keep certain programs running and avoid staff reductions.
The district received about $1.2 billion in stimulus funds, amounting to about 12-15% of its annual operating budget of about $3.5 billion. The funds helped offset a $95 million revenue drop — the decline in traditional public school student enrollment and a decrease in the district’s overall state funding allocation, among other factors — and $141 million increase in expenses.
As those funds dry up — which Steiger predicts will happen in the next year or two — officials will have to have “difficult conversations” about what programs are cut or kept.
“There’s nothing easy to cut. The programs that exist, exist for a reason, whether it’s Special Education, English as a second language or the arts. There is nothing left that is superfluous, that is not key, that is not important to our community,” he told the Herald. “So to throw some names out there about what will be cut is irresponsible. But like I said, there’s nothing not on the table.”
If the referendum fails, the conversation about cuts becomes “substantially worse and more immediate,” he said.
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A different environment from 2018
Despite the voters’ overwhelming support of the 2018 referendum, some are concerned leading up to the November vote.
“A lot has changed in four years,” said Antonio White, first vice president of United Teachers of Dade, the Miami-Dade teachers union. “The culture war issues are out there and they’re real.”
For one, the 2018 referendum came nine months after the Feb. 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County that left 17 people dead. The referendum helped fund school security.
In 2020 came the pandemic, which closed schools, sparked a parents’ rights movement and, later, set off a growing distrust of school boards by some parents.
Still, White said, “we must try to educate the community as to what this is” and the “devastating” toll a failed effort will have on the district. Without the referendum, the district will have to cut positions, which is “what we’ve been trying to avoid.”
The district recently launched a series of town halls for people to listen to a presentation and ask questions about the referendum.
And at a news conference Thursday, Dotres said district officials have been providing information about the referendum on social media and during parent open houses, in addition to the town halls. White, of UTD, said the union “is going to be doing mailers and workshops.”
The press conference, held by the Save our Futures political action committee, featured the superintendent, some school board members, district officials, UTD leadership and a handful of representatives from community organizations.
James Lopez, executive director of Power U Center for Social Change, a nonprofit that develops leadership programs among Black and brown youth, is among some in the community who are concerned officials allotted too little time to get voters on board. The public needs time to understand how “severe the situation is and how complex the context is around this referendum,” he said.
“We support the referendum not because we like to raise property taxes, but because if it doesn’t pass, we know we’re going to have an implosion in [Miami-Dade schools] as we know it,’’ he said. “Teachers aren’t going to want to stay if they get a 15% pay cut when they’re already leaving the field,” he said. “You have to not only give people time to understand what’s on the ballot, but why.”
This story was originally published October 7, 2022 at 5:30 AM.
