All Extra-Curricular Stipends Cut

according to articles


www.nwitimes.com/sports/high-school/indiana/article_19e2efb4-6f41-11df-88ed-001cc4c03286.html

Have any administrators at either the school or district level anywhere in the U.S. taken voluntary pay cuts in the interest of saving programs for their students? Amazing how they seem to know coaches, of all people, are most likely to bite the bullet in the interest of their kids.

Lots of horror stories out there - Nephew teaches in Chicago suburb, all of the non-tenured teachers will be working at 75% this year.

I am in the process of losing extended pay and career ladder - about $9,000 - to the point where I'd probably make more taking retired. I don't want to retire but this had becaome silly.
Our supt. ask that it not be taken personally to the those that lost extended pay - how can it not? I ask him if he would be losing $9,000 this year...

At my school students have to pay to play every sport. $50 for basketball, $60 for baseball, $500 for football, $1,200 for hockey. Its brutal and really hurts our numbers.

"Pay to Play" has become the rule rather than the exception around here.

My gripe is: What are they paying for? i.e. how can schools still cut coaches, transportation, equipment budgets, etc.? Where is the kids' money going?

To pay the Super.

I am not a teacher and not at all a modern union supporter, but this seems like the type of thing I would support a union on. It seems like this is the exact purpose of a union

The school I was at for the past 5 years had $0 direct support from the school. The district gives each HS (there are 5) in the district $5k for safety equipment each year. That was the amount they gave in 1983 as well. The football program got $2.5k one year and the full $5k the next. The money was for helmets and shoulder pads, catcher’s masks, softball shin guards, basic safety gear for all the teams. They did cover the maintenance of the fields and the referees and such. But no direct contributions to the team.

The kids had to pay $50 as the pay-to-play (all sports) and that was supposed to go to pay the coaches stipends. The football program got 5 paid stipends, I don’t know what the other programs had for paid positions.

The team had to raise all other funds either from team activities, donations, or from the athletic booster club. We had no buses ($1,400 to get the JV and varsity to/from a game 40 miles away), uniforms, pads, bags, field paint, tape, video tape, awards, that we didn’t raise the money for ourselves. The football games apparently brought in $16-22k per year which went to the athletic department to support the other, smaller programs. We never saw those funds.

At my new school, which is in a “richer” demographic area, the pay-to-play is substantially higher across the board but that is because the district does not cover all the things that the other district covered. The link below is for the Spring parents so they can understand the fee a bit better.

www.dvwildcats.com/sports/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/AthleticContributions.SPRING2.pdf

We’re just finishing spring ball and the players are selling cookie dough to earn their $120 for the summer weight program. After that they will do cards and something else.

I know that it’s always easy to go after the administrative fat cats with their big salaries, but what would it take for you to do that job? I’m not saying that there aren’t a lot of low-hanging fruit in the admin/superintendent area, but would you want that job? Based on what I saw at the previous school, what the guy had to deal with on a daily basis, I wouldn’t want that job at all.

It seems that the HS athletics are slowly becoming our own little fiefdoms - we will be earning the stipends by running our own summer camps, charging for weight rooms, and generally starting to operate as a club-type operation. In some ways I think type of operation may be preferable to the current operating model.

Here's the article...........


HeraldTimesOnline.com
MCCSC-teacher deal restores librarians, won’t pay coaches, band leaders, sponsors
By Andy Graham 331-4215 | agraham@heraldt.com
June 2, 2010

The contract approved today by the MCCSC board and the MCEA teachers union will restore all 15 media specialist positions to district libraries for at least the 2010-11 school year.

A by-product of that move will restore some teachers to classrooms. The jobs or job descriptions of 26 people could be immediately affected, overall, in terms of moving back into positions they previously held.

That restoration effort is funded in part through the Monroe County Education Association’s agreement to a teacher salary freeze for the length of the two-year contract, except for scheduled incremental raises for teachers in their first 15 years of service. But those increments will now be capped at 2 percent, less than had been scheduled in many cases.

The contract also cuts all stipends for extra-curricular activities for one year — music, sports, theater, Science Olympiad and other programming outside the classroom. Those programs can continue, but either with some sort of alternate funding or on a volunteer basis, and athletic directors are now left scrambling for coaches and even means to conduct programs with the start of the fall semester’s competitive season only about two months away.

Monroe County Community School Corp. controller Tim Thrasher said elimination of the stipends would save the district about $750,000 next year, and that he and union officials didn’t have a firm number yet on the increment cap but he estimated the savings there to be at least $350,000. He said if teachers had received an overall raise at, say, 2 percent, that would have amounted to another $1.6 million or so in expenditures from the general fund over the two years of the contract.

DOWNLOAD: MCCSC original workforce reduction list (PDF)

SEARCH: MCCSC employee salary database


Classroom over non-classroom
Before the MCCSC board voted 6-0 to approve the new contract, with Jim Muehling on a business trip and not voting, members said they value extra-curricular activities but felt their bottom-line choice was to put more teachers in front of children in classrooms.

Sandy Steele, Indiana State Teachers Association UniServe regional director, agreed, saying, “We had to ask many of our teachers to sacrifice quite a bit, and the elimination of ECA stipends is very difficult for some. We had a positive vote (this morning) on the contract, but it wasn’t 100 percent.

“But restoration of positions has been what we’ve been about since the beginning.”

After the 15 media specialist positions were eliminated during this spring’s round of $5.8 million in MCCSC budget cuts, made in the wake of state funding shortfalls, 11 of the media specialists with seniority and the required licenses were placed in classrooms and other positions in the district. The other four were not scheduled to return to the MCCSC. Now, all 15 media specialist positions are restored, and the 11 classroom teachers and other staff scheduled to be displaced by media specialists could also return.


A price to pay
But the ECA news was still a hard new reality for many, especially the over 400 coaches and sponsors for those activities, many of whom are teachers. They will now have to volunteer any extra hours of work if they wish to preserve those programs unless something changes.

Janis Stockhouse, who has spent the better part of four decades building Bloomington High School North’s award-winning music program, was contacted this morning during North’s teacher appreciation festivities and clearly didn’t feel especially appreciated or festive. “It’s inconceivable that on June 2 that they would just announce . . . ‘No festivals, no musicals, no theater, no coaches of any kind, no Science Olympiad, nothing after 2:30 p.m.,’” Stockhouse said. “It’s my understanding this was the school board’s recommendation ... with the notion of getting people in the community riled up and prepared to support a referendum.

“Sports, music, theater, so many things that keep so many students in school, engaged with school, could go by the wayside. It’s so unfair to do something like this on June 2 when plans have already been made for the fall and everybody is leaving town with school out. It’s a knee-jerk reaction and so ill-timed. It’s not fair to our seniors, especially, but to any of our kids. I cannot believe this is happening in the Monroe County Community School Corporation.”


Choosing between bad choices
Chuck Rubright — chair of the Education Law Group for Bose McKinney & Evans attorneys and in his 35th year of negotiating contracts for school corporations — began his presentation this morning by saying that he is, indeed, seeing things he’s never seen happening before in public education.

“I’ve never seen anything like the last nine months in education,” said Rubright, who led the MCCSC negotiating team. “Before, school boards made choices between best options for their students. Now, with the state having reneged regarding the funding levels upon which school district budgets were based, boards are making choices between bad options and are just trying to get through the next six months.

“I bring before you today a contract I would not have been proud to present in the past 34 years, and it’s a contract not everybody will agree with, but I firmly believe it is the best contract under the circumstances that could get ratified by both sides.”

Rubright complimented the union negotiating team for its willingness help to work things out, and Steele reciprocated. “Last Wednesday, I wouldn’t have given 10 cents for the chances that we’d be here today,” she said. “But we all pulled together.”

The terms of the contract also will delay notifications of positions to be eliminated and notifications of reduction-in-force layoffs by a month. “We hope that will help the timing, so that in future we won’t have to ‘over-RIF,’ ” MCCSC assistant superintendent for human resources Peggy Chambers said. The MCCSC is still working to recall employees from the 79 laid off earlier this spring.


What now?
Board members and others at the board meeting indicated they would work to help restore funding for extra-curricular stipends through booster clubs, though those can’t pay coaching salaries directly, and fund-raising through entities such as the Foundation of Monroe County Community Schools.

Foundation director Tina Peterson said today she is investigating what her organization, which is already in the midst of a $3 million campaign to benefit MCCSC programs, can bring to bear regarding ECA expenses.

“This has happened so quickly, we still have to do some homework on the legalities,” Peterson said. “There are federal equity and Title IX issues regarding funding for sports. Do all the programs have to be restored at one time, for equity reasons? Do the girls’ and boys’ programs have to come on-line simultaneously? That sort of thing. I do think, in the athletic area, direct payment for the coach has to come through the school system.

“But the foundation is more than willing, like we were with the Elementary Strings and Bradford Woods restoration efforts, to be a pass-through for funding ... . We’re going to get together with principals, Tim Thrasher, a board representative and others to hash it out and then tell people what they can or cannot do to help address this.”



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New MCCSC contract summary
The Monroe County Community School Corp. and Monroe County Education Association teachers union both ratified a new two-year contract Wednesday which will:

• Restore all media specialist positions in all MCCSC schools for one year, also allowing for 11 laid-off teachers to return to positions that media specialists with seniority and licenses to teach had moved into.

• Maintain the percentage of MCCSC contributions to employee health benefit packages, amounting to an increase in funding.

• Provide no salary increase for teachers for either the 2009-10 school year, during which they worked under the details of the old contract, or the 2010-11 school year except for incremental increases for teachers in the first 15 years of service to be capped at 2 percent.

• Not fund stipends for any of the over 400 ECA (extra-curriculars) coaches or sponsors for one year. This applies to all athletics and all co-curriculars such as music, theater, student government, honor societies, Science Olympiad, and more.

Pay to play is fine but it should not be so much it eliminates kids and it should reflect what the sport brings in- football generally is by far the biggest gate of any sport and also the best money maker for booster concession sales so fee's should reflect football brings in far more then other sports do.

I started a thread several years ago here about the US going to a club model for all sports....looks like we may be headed that way.

No, pay to play is not fine. These kids deserve to get to be involved in exrtra-curricular activities without paying a dime.

THIS IS {censored}!!!!!!

Whats th alternative? You can be pissed but at least have a viable solution to put forth.

Public school funding (the general fund, wherein salaries and stipends come from) in Indiana, where this school is located, changed last year from property taxes in the school districts to a portion of sales tax statewide. The state government uses a formula (I'm not exactly sure what it is) to determine how much money each school receives per student. Some school districts receive more per student than others. I teach in a small rural school, and we are in the bottom 10-15 in the state for dollars per student. With the economy tanking, sales tax was down, therefore school budgets were cut. Last January, the governor implemented a huge budget cut that was to take place immediately, which forced many schools to make immediate cuts to support personnel, with many school districts RIFing teachers at the end of the year. Our district tried to pass a referendum to raise money and prevent the RIFing, but it was soundly defeated. As a result, several teachers were let go, the stipends for a large number of ECA positions were suspended for a year, and all remaining paid positions were cut by a third. Its not an ideal situation for anyone, but even if only a couple of teaching positions are saved by cutting ECA's temporarily, at least in our district it will make a huge impact.