UNION, Maine — An experiment tying teacher pay, in part, to student performance has been dropped by a midcoast-area school district.
The Regional School Unit 40 board approved a three-year labor contract at its Thursday evening meeting that covers about 200 teachers and drops the performance incentives from the previous contract that were based on certain performance goals being achieved at individual schools.
Board member Tod Brown, who was the board’s chief negotiator for the new contract approved last week, said Monday the money set aside in the prior contract for incentives would be used to pay for additional professional training for teachers going forward. This training would amount to 90 minutes per week.
“We want to give teachers the training to help them be more effective. We are going at it in a different way,” Brown said about switching from the incentive program for the school district that serves the communities of Union, Warren, Waldoboro, Friendship and Washington.
He said results for the first round of testing to determine whether schools reached their performance goals under the old contract have not yet been compiled. If individual schools did meet their goals as determined by the results of the Northwest Evaluation Assessment and the Fountas and Pinnell assessments, teachers in those schools would receive an additional $1,000 as promised under the previous contract.
That contract, which expires at the end of August, was adopted in December 2013, after more than a year of difficult negotiations as well as mediation and fact finding.
Brown said the difficulty in getting a contract last time, as well as continued opposition from teachers, played a part in the decision to not include the incentive program tied to performance goals in the new contract.
“They had not bought into the process,” he said.
Paul Forest, president the Medomak Valley Education Association, said Tuesday it was a mutual decision to end the incentive pay. He said the board realized it would be difficult to fund the incentive system and agreed not to include that clause in the new contract.
In 2013, the board issued a news release upon the signing of that contract, saying the pact made “groundbreaking changes in the way teachers are paid and represents a step forward in accountability for teachers and students. These changes are directed toward improved student achievement through better teaching.”
The new contract, approved last week, will provide pay increases of at least 2.5 percent for teachers during each of the three years of the labor pact. Some teachers will get as much as a 5 percent increase as they move up steps on the salary scale.
The base pay for a starting teacher with a bachelor’s degree in 2015-2016 will be $34,029. That goes to $58,583 for teachers with 24 years or more of experience.
Brown said the board also agreed to the new contract because it realized the RSU 40 pay scale was lower than neighboring districts. Teachers have left the district during the past year, with the superintendent saying those teachers are telling him it was because they could get a job in a neighboring district for more money.
Starting pay for a teacher with a bachelor degree in the Rockland-based RSU 13, for example, is $36,250. That same teacher would receive $60,972 after 19 years of service.
Both districts pay more for teachers with more advanced degrees.