The current crisis in Public Education is twofold. Teachers are leaving the profession, and there is a lack of qualified teachers to fill those positions. While it took some time for it to impact education, what economists and employment experts are calling “The Great Resignation” has indeed done so. Fortunately, for now, in Newark this has been limited to classroom teachers whose numbers are leaving Newark at a startling rate compared to other education workers and support staff.
The Newark Board of Education proposed a solution for recruitment and retention directed solely at attracting classroom teachers and keeping them. In the initial proposal the district focused their efforts on new hires, moving the starting salary to $62,000, and making steps 2-8 equal to that.
The Newark Board of Education and Newark Teachers Union Negotiations Committee developed new teacher salary guides for the school years 2022-2023 and 2023-2024. These new guides extend the retention strategy the district proposed for steps 1-8 to provide new increases on EVERY step after step 8, as well. These new guides reflect a $500 increase each year in addition to the already contractual increases.
This addendum to our current contract was approved by the NTU and NBOE Negotiations teams respectively and subsequently submitted to President Abeigon who in turn sought and secured approval by the NTU Executive Board in a Special Session.
The importance of this agreement cannot be overstated. This is a great first step in attracting new hires, retaining recently hired and recently tenured staff, and rewarding those who have remained throughout Newark’s most challenging decade. Equally important is the impact this will have on all staff salary guides in our future negotiations set to begin in January 2023. This has added new dollars to the current salary guide that will be used to impact ALL salary guides in coming negotiations.
Concurrent with this addendum, the NTU Evaluation Framework Committee is drafting a document to be shared with the Superintendent with specific recommendations for workload reduction for all titles. This is an important measure in retaining education workers and has been delineated in a recent report by the federal government as critically important.
It is our sincere hope that these two measures will radically shift school culture and restore the sense of community that was once the hallmark of the Newark Board of Education.
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As we said in the above Statement, the only changes to the contract were on the Teacher salary guides. Steps 1-8 were raised to $62,000, and the higher steps were raised by $500 in 2022-2023 and an additional $500 in 2023-2024. In order to accommodate this movement, a new step had to be created to fill in that gap.
The attached Salary Progression should be read from left to right. First column is your current step. The next two columns are comparisons of the current guides and the new guides for 2022-2023, and the two columns after that are comparisons for 2023-2024.
There were no givebacks or changes to working conditions.