The most jarring bit of information I got at last week’s school board’s committee meetings came unexpectedly. We were discussing the District’s Unemployment Compensation Insurance needs. Generally the critical question would be how much are our premiums now and how much would they be if we got another insurer to provide them to us. The cost news wasn’t bad. What alarmed me was the accompanying documentary evidence to show we were currently getting very good cost coverage.
Insurance Companies will need to know the liabilities that an employer will face. The simplest figure to begin calculations would be the total salary that the District owes its employees – the ones whose unemployment compensentation is being covered by insurance.
I can’t recall how much the new contracts we signed last year bumped up this year’s salary and I’m too lazy to look for it now as I put in one quick Sunday Post. If I had to guess I’d say 2%. So it was with great surprise that I saw that our payroll jumped 4.8% from last year to this year. That would be two and a half times the 2% figure I’m guessing at in my laziness. I asked for confirmation that this was just salary increases and the answer I was given was “yes.”
I’m sure there are mitigating factors. Last year, for instance, our legislature gave us a one time bump in state aids which allowed us to add staff. More staff means more salary paid even if the pay increases only average 2%.
I’ve never asked our business office for this information but it showed up in this roundabout way. This increase not only greatly exceeds the advertised contract increase it blows the inflation rate to smithereens. Our salary is skyrocketing at five times last year’s inflation rate. This year because of the drop in gasoline prices there is almost no inflation at all. Here are a couple of graphs on an inflation calculator that provided the inflation figures.
For any parent or teacher desperate to bring student numbers down in our classrooms, this seems ominous.
