Tensions rise over teacher pay as union presents petition for $50K base pay, legislative action

Local educators are approaching their breaking points. While they have faced new challenges this year with substitute and staffing shortages as well as the ongoing pandemic, teachers also continue to battle against a poorly-funded public education system and high cost of living.

On Wednesday, at the Eagle County School District Board of Education meeting, members of the Education Association of Eagle County presented a petition with just over 400 signatures addressed to the school board and Colorado state legislators. The petition asks both parties to “do the right thing.”

Of state legislatures it asks that they “provide our public schools with increased funding that allows school districts to hire and retain quality teachers.”

Of the local school board, it asks the board to “set salaries at a base of $50,000 for certified staff and raise all salaries commensurately so that we can attract and retain the very best staff our students deserve.”

Eagle County Education Association represents 43% — or 252 — of the district’s teachers. The union only represents all educators, including classified personnel, as well as office managers, registrars and custodians. It does not represent administrators or support staff.

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Karen Kolibaba, a fifth grade teacher and president of the local teacher’s union, presented the petition at Wednesday’s meeting — supported in the audience by a dozen other educators.

“We, the professional teaching staff of Eagle County School, work hard to make sure that all of our students receive the learning experience they deserve,” Kolibaba said. “Unfortunately, our dedication to our students does not translate to making financial ends meet.”

Carrie Rodgers, a second grade teacher in the district, reiterated this point as she spoke in front of the board on Wednesday.

“I’ve been having a rough year as a teacher,” Rodgers said. “We boast about the quality of life here, and it is wonderful, but the last three years a lot of us have been struggling with not having the quality of life that we have wanted, or came here for, because of things out of our control.”

Rodgers said that she moved to Eagle County eight years ago from a teaching job in inner city Baltimore.

“I took a $10,000 paycut to become a para-educator here, ” she said. “I fell in love with the valley. But now, eight years later, (after) finishing my grad school program — I went through alternative licensing to become a teacher with my psych bachelors — I’m back to that burnout stage that I was at when I left inner city Baltimore.”

Rodgers even detailed an exchange from earlier this year where she emailed Superintendent Philip Qualman “in tears.”

Addressing Qualman at the meeting, she said ultimately what stopped her from resigning was “you came and you cried with me.”

“I don’t want to leave teaching,” Rodgers said, later adding: “But, I can’t afford to stay if we don’t get this pay raise.”

The union’s petition states that over 70% of Eagle County Schools’ teachers hold one or more additional jobs to make ends meet. The petition highlights the fact that while Colorado has one of the top economies in the nation; it consistently ranks in the bottom 20% of states for K-12 funding.

“It is a crisis for our students and for our schools when great teachers cannot afford to stay in the profession and when young teachers cannot afford to take a job in our district,” Kolibaba read from the petition on Wednesday. “We stand to lose many highly qualified teachers and classified staff due to non-competitive wages.”

In asking for the raise, Kolibaba said that the union sees a “crisis on the horizon,” with regard to staff turnover and an inability to attract new, highly qualified teachers and staff to the district.

The district responds

During the meeting, Superintendent Qualman responded to the union’s petition, first expressing support for the petition’s message.

“We hear you, we are there with you 100%. This board agrees that we need to compensate our board better,” he said. “Colorado needs to address K-12 funding in a more comprehensive way, so thank you for joining me and for forcefully advocating with state leaders to change the way we educate K-12.”

However, Qualman went on to express that he felt the petition was misdirected and failed to address all that has been done by the district for teacher salary and benefits.

“Your message and your petition is rightly addressed to state leaders. Our K-12 funding model is broken in the state and it’s going to continue to get worse until we make some major changes to it, but I think that the message is wrongly addressed to this board,” Qualman said.

The Eagle County Education Association has been pushing to get to a $50,000 base salary for several years. Back in 2019, the union made the same ask of the board and was told the district couldn’t afford it. Progress has been made since then through negotiations. The most recent salary increase — in which the base salary was raised to $45,000 — was approved in December 2021and hit staff paychecks in January 2022.

On Wednesday, Qualman said that over the past six years of negotiations the district has averaged a 5% salary increase per year; allocating $26,865,680 — 77% of the total amount allocated during negotiations from 2016 to 2022 — to salary, benefits and compensation.

“I don’t say this to say it’s enough, please don’t hear that; we need to do a lot more,” Qualman said. “My point is to say, with what we’ve got, we’ve given as much as we can without putting the district in financial trouble.”

In an email on Thursday, Qualman (responding to questions from the Vail Daily) wrote that from the district’s general fund budget of $90.2 million, 58% goes to staff salary and 24% goes to benefits.

The district and teacher’s union is currently engaged in a negotiations process in which salary will be addressed.

The district has previously said that the district will need to evaluate levers outside of compensation to remain competitive against other districts.

At Wednesday’s meeting, Qualman said that contract days could be one of the levers to get to a higher base salary. Eagle County Schools currently has a 182-day contract and the eight districts in Colorado with higher starting salaries average 4.4 more contract days per year than the local district, Qualman said.

“Were we to get to that type of contract length, we would certainly compensate that per-diem and that would get us even closer to the top,” he said. “And we’ve got to get there for the purposes of recruiting and retaining our educators.”

According to data from the Colorado Department of Education, in terms of average teacher salary, Eagle County Schools ranks 33 out of 195 districts with an average salary of $54,990 for the 2020-21 school year. Kolibaba wrote on Thursday (responding to an email from the Vail Daily) that this average is $9,000 less than the average teacher salary in Summit County and a number of other places where cost of living is lower.

“Superintendent Qualman is correct that the Board of Education and ECEA have mutually agreed to make great strides to increase educator salary and benefits, but we still have a long way to go,” Kolibaba wrote.

At Wednesday’s meeting, Qualman also addressed the district’s progress on the housing plan. While he acknowledged it wasn’t salary and compensation, he said that “the more affordable we can get our housing, the more reasonable it becomes for people to live here.”

He went on to list the progress made since 2019, when the district had 24 units of housing it managed.

“That 24 has been nearly doubled and will quadruple in the next two years,” Qualman said. “We added five master lease units in 2020, in 2021 we added another 14 master lease units. In 2022, it’s going to be a big year, we’re going to add hopefully 12 more master lease units, if we can pull it off and in 2023, we’re going to add 49 units through 37 rentals in Edwards and 12-16 for ownership in Eagle.”

He acknowledged that while it’s progress, it is still not meeting staff needs and progress on this front is “too slow.”

The final area in which he said the district has made progress is around mill levies.

“Our community stepped up in 2016 and passed 3A, which provided 10% salary increases to our organization. And in 2020, we passed 5B which removed the sunset from 3A,” he said.

In addressing why the association also addressed the petition to the Board of Education, Kolibaba wrote that “our members also wanted to present to the Board of Education a unified message that we must use whatever resources we can to ensure that quality staff are in front of students.”

The superintendent’s warning

After listing the progress made, Qualman noted that in misdirecting this message to the board, there were risks.

“This board has worked really hard to make every dollar that we have available to staff and that they’ll continue to do that as much as they possibly can,” he said “Creating friction where none exists runs three risks.”

The three risks he stated were: that it allows a narrative that portrays the district as not supportive of the union, which runs a risk to the union’s membership and its impact; that it risks the collective efficacy of the district by making the two parties feel like adversaries; and that it runs the risk of damaging community support for the district.

“I’ll share the same message with ECEA that I share with those who’ve spoken in this room against masks and against vaccines and against critical race theory and against every other decision that we’ve made in the last two years,” Qualman said. “We hear you and we appreciate your voice. But remember that we’re neighbors and we’re colleagues, and we’re friends and those relationships represent our foundation and we can’t lose sight of that. We’re on one team, we’re rowing in the same direction, navigating the same rapids and that’s how we survive and thrive.”

Kolibaba wrote on Thursday that the association “did not expect the response from Superintendent Qualman that we heard last night.”

“The last two years have been extremely difficult for everyone. All of us are working harder than ever to ensure that students succeed. Emotions are, of course, running high,” Kolibaba wrote. “As our educators are faced with a growing workload, buildings that are short-staffed, losing valuable planning time to cover classes, and struggling through the pandemic, it is important for all of us to come together even if there is ‘friction’ to work towards outcomes that benefits our students while honoring and respecting educators.”

Addressing the state

While tension continues over these issues between the district and union, there is one area they agree on: the biggest responsibility sits with the state.

In her email, Kolibaba wrote that the association brought forward the petition now because the state’s legislative session just began.

“The State Legislature is beginning to meet about the budget and needs to know how important the issue of school funding is for our students and our educators,” Kolibaba wrote. “The timing is right to ensure that decision makers at the Capitol know that educators are more impacted now than ever by budget constraints.”

Kolibaba added that the Colorado state legislature has “underfunded and harmed our public school system.”

“The state legislature must act now to ensure that our students and staff do not suffer further,” she wrote.

At Wednesday’s meeting, Qualman echoed this sentiment.

“We’ve got a big challenge ahead of us and until we get state legislators and state government officials to understand the predicament, it’s going to continue to get worse,” he said.

For his part, Qualman said that he has been engaged in advocacy efforts at the state level, including engaging in direct dialogue with state legislators and even the governor’s staff.

Since the state legislative session resumed at the start of the year, a number of education bills have been introduced and are now making their way through the Colorado statehouse. Not all deal directly with addressing the state’s education funding challenges, but a number provide possible fixes that could improve some challenges.

For example, a bill has been introduced and passed the education committee that could allow retirees to serve as substitute teachers without losing their retirement benefits. Qualman noted Wednesday that this might be one way to address the substitute shortage.

Another bill would create a student education stipend program to help eligible students reduce the financial barriers to student teaching. This has the potential to help combat the national teacher shortage and help to incentivize the profession.

In addition, Gov. Jared Polis in his 2022-23 budget proposed an 8% increase in school funding — translating to an additional $13,000 for a class of 25 students — as well as a 4.7%, or $150 million, reduction in the Budget Stabilization Factor and $300 million to the state education fund to prioritize buy-down in future years.

The Budget Stabilization Factor was put in place in 2010 during the financial crisis to cut education funding without forsaking Amendment 21, which, among other things, requires the state to increase the per-pupil school funding with the rate of inflation. Even though last school year, the state reduced the factor, the cost to schools continues to rise each year. Since 2010, Colorado schools have missed out on nearly $10 billion in funding due to the stabilization factor.

Moving forward, both the district and the union have expressed not only a desire to continue to advocate at the state level, but also a desire to continue to work collaboratively on local solutions.

“We’re in this together, let’s continue to work together toward meaningful solutions,” Qualman said in his closing remarks on Wednesday. “I appreciate your voice and I appreciate what you’re saying.”

“We’re going to continue to work collaboratively with the school district to attract and retain the best educators for our students,” Kolibaba wrote. “It’s been an extremely difficult year and tensions may run high, but ECEA is committed to doing what’s best for our students and colleagues.”