St. Paul teachers are seeking pay increases far beyond those sought in recent years, but the potential funding source they point to is unusual, too: $54 million in new state aid to the district.
They don’t have to venture far to know there’s success in that strategy.
Union leaders in three suburban districts whose contracts have been eyed with envy by the St. Paul rank-and-file have secured deals worth nearly the same amount of money that their school systems received as part of last year’s historic $2.2 billion state investment in schools. That much-heralded boost included funds designated specifically to special-education students and English language learners.
Throughout this bargaining cycle, teachers unions have been angling for a share of that overall investment, saying the pay hikes being negotiated now are an overdue boost to teacher compensation, and in turn, a strengthening of recruitment and retention efforts at a time of morale-sapping shortages. But the handsome packages also are putting districts in an all-too-familiar belt-tightening mode.
“It was really our time,” Stacey Vanderport, president of the Mounds View Education Association, said of a new two-year deal awarding raises of 6% this year and 10% in 2024-25.
Teacher salaries vary across districts and include automatic hikes based on levels of education and experience. Mounds View sought to be competitive not only with its peers but also local employers like Medtronic. In St. Paul, annual pay ranges from about $49,000 for a starting teacher with a bachelor’s degree to about $102,000 for teachers with a PhD and 20 years of experience.
The compensation packages in the Mounds View, Anoka-Hennepin and South Washington County districts nearly match the increases in state aid for those districts, which includes pots of money that can be easily tapped for raises and others meant for specific uses. But state Rep. Cheryl Youakim, DFL-Hopkins, who chairs the House Education Finance Committee, takes no issue with the size of the compensation packages.
“Just like districts are underfunded, teacher pay hasn’t kept up with inflation either,” she said last week.