About 75 percent of the Wayne-Westland Community School's $111 million budget goes towards paying employees covered by its current collective bargaining agreement for teachers and a few other employee groups. (The budget figure does not include debt service payments on past construction projects.) Wayne-Westland Community Schools enrolls about 13,100 students and employs approximately 830 teachers.
Teacher salaries are determined by a single salary schedule that grants automatic pay raises based solely on an employee's years on the job plus additional pedagogy credentials. Teachers are granted "tenure" after 4 years on the job, and once tenured are evaluated once every three years, but neither these evaluations nor the performance of their students affect how much they are paid.
Wayne-Westland teachers get automatic annual pay raises of 6 percent as they progress through the time-on-the-job "steps" of the salary schedule. All teachers, regardless of their position on the step schedule, receive a 1.5 percent annual pay increase as the entire salary schedule grows by that amount. The vast majority of teachers in the district receive a base salary between $52,540 and $79,688; the average amount was $62,582 in 2009.
The district pays between $13,079 and $16,635 annually for teacher health insurance plans. Most teachers contribute $40 a month to the cost of their health insurance premiums. The statewide average cost in the private sector for an employer-provided family plan is $11,300, with the employee picking up 22 percent of that amount. The district also provides life, long-term disability, vision and dental insurance at no cost to employees.
School employees are entitled to a lifetime pension when they retire, and also expect to receive lifetime post-retirement health benefits. Based on the state-run retirement system's formula, the lifetime pension for a Wayne-Westland teacher with 30 years experience and an average base salary of $79,688 (the final "step" on the salary schedule) would be $35,860. For most retirees, this amount increases by 3 percent every year. An employee may begin collecting a pension upon reaching age of 55, or younger if he or she has 30 years of employment in public schools.
The union contract also covers working hours and conditions. The contractual work year is 181 days long and each day is 6 hours and 20 minutes. This adds up to 1,146 hours per year. The U.S. average is 1,792 hours.
Teachers are allotted 10 sick, 2 bereavement and 3 personal leave days each year and may accumulate these without limit. Upon retiring from the district, each unused leave day is worth $30. The local union also gets a total of 110 leave days per year that it can give to teachers to conduct union business.
The union contract also includes bonus pay for additional duties. Being one of the 43 different department heads can net teachers anywhere from $1,421 to $3,909 per year. Acting as a "6th grade liason" pays an additional $3,198. Finally, teachers can earn extra cash by coaching or participating in other extracurricular activities, such as band, drama, yearbook, intramurals, student clubs and many others. Aside from coaching (which pays between $711 and $6,301), there are more than 80 different extracurricular positions available to teachers that pay between $711 and $5,293 annually.
A fully detailed analysis can be found here.
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