Panel debates directing new education funds to teacher pay instead of smaller classes

A legislative education panel heard debate on whether increased state education funding should be used this year primarily for higher teacher pay or for reducing class sizes. Speaker 2 told legislators that classroom size in Utah has been largely flat and that, based on studies he reviewed, a reduction of “a half a student or 1 student may or may not be very dramatic immediately,” and recommended, “this year that the money goes to salaries rather than classroom size reduction.”

Legislators and district officials described efforts to raise starting pay by compressing salary schedules. Ferdinand Wittenberg, addressed in the discussion as a superintendent-level official, said local districts had “collapsed the salary schedules and put the first 3 steps into the same schedule with a significant increase there,” and added that boards had negotiated longevity increments for teachers with 17 or 25 years of service. Officials warned, however, that compressing steps can create pressure and resentment among teachers at the top of the pay scale who receive proportionally smaller increases.

A lawmaker asking about year-to-year compensation cited last year’s roughly 3% package tied to a $12,000,000 appropriation and summarized the governor’s proposal as a 6% increase in the weighted pupil unit (WPU). That lawmaker noted offsets the governor proposed — about 2% for insurance costs and a half-percent for retirement contributions — and estimated those effects, along with increments, would translate to roughly a 3.3% increase in teachers’ take-home pay. Speaker 6 characterized the proposed package as “not a good enough package” to close a pay gap that the official said had widened from about $900 below the national average four years earlier to about $5,500 below today.

Panel members also discussed the broader workforce in schools, telling the committee that bus drivers, lunch staff and other lower-paid employees can face large relative impacts from fringe-benefit costs. Several speakers said local teacher associations and some districts have accepted schedule compression as a tool to lift starting salaries, but that associations indicated they would expect more than a 6% nominal increase before ratifying agreements.

The panel left the matter unresolved and did not adopt any formal statewide directive; discussion was cut short by an unrelated safety incident that led to an adjournment. The committee planned to reconvene the following morning at 10 a.m., pending safety clearances.