Union Wins Teacher Incentive Fund Payout Settlement

IF YOU EARNED AN "INCENTIVE" UNDER THE TEACHER INCENTIVE FUND PROGRAM IN 2010-11, COME GET YOUR CHECK:

Checks are available this Friday at The Laborer's Union Hall, 206 Guachpangue Rd., Espanola.  This is a white one-story building at the intersection of Highway 30 (Los Alamos Highway) and Santa Clara Bridge Road (west of the River). Domino’s Pizza is across the street.  Special thanks to our union brothers and sisters of The Laborer's Union.

While no story is totally factually correct, Mr. Louis McGill of the Rio Grande Sun got the gist of this story correct (August 2, 2012): 

The Española School District’s failed teacher incentive program will finally pay out. The School Board unanimously approved a settlement July 25 to pay $304,442.44 to District employees, far less than the $1,177,796.76 owed to the teachers from the District’s aborted arrangement with the Northern New Mexico Network.

Charles Goodmacher, the National Education Association’s liaison to the local union, said 91 teachers and 16 teachers assistants would be receiving the money from the incentive program. The 15 employees who were involved in the program’s leadership and appeals committees, will receive compensation ranging from $166 to $1,000, for their time spent on the committees.

Teachers qualified for incentive bonuses if a certain percentage of their students showed improvement in reading and math scores. According to the settlement, teachers who qualified for incentive payments will receive $897.09 per qualifying area and instructional aids will receive $448.55 per qualifying area. These will be paid by Aug 10. The same teachers will be paid again Aug. 10, 2013, with $901.90 per qualifying area going to teachers and $450.95 going to instructional assistants.

The settlement also stipulates that any amount recovered from Northern New Mexico Network in excess of the amount agreed to will be divided equally between the District and the teachers’ union, which will designate how payments will be made to qualifying employees.

However, Superintendent Art Blea said the union couldn’t sue the Network or the federal government themselves because the teachers’ agreement was only with the District.

Approval of the settlement was pushed back because Blea said it required two minor changes, which were moving payments from the Aug. 1 to Aug. 10, to coincide with the District’s normal payment schedule, and correcting his first name to Arthur from Arturo.

At the Board meeting, Blea commended the union for not pursuing higher penalties against the District, saying that they could have.

“We were 100 percent sure that our case would have won, so we certainly saved the District and ourselves a lot of trouble and a great deal of legal expenses from the settlement, and that’s all money that is better used in the District itself,” Goodmacher said. “We’re also happy that we’re able to reach an agreement that’s in everyone’s best interest.”

However, Goodmacher said the teachers would likely not have won the entire amount, because when they signed their agreement to participate, they signed it with the understanding that the award that year would be in the smaller amount.

“They knew the District wasn’t going to come up with their money, but everyone thought the District was going to be able to use the federal money,” he said. “So, while we felt going in that it was possible for us to ask for 100 percent, we weren’t 100 percent confident of getting that 100 percent because that’s what people understood at the time.”

Board president Floyd Archuleta said he was glad that the District and the union could reach an agreement to spread the payment of the compensation out over a couple of years.

“I am glad we reached a settlement,” said Archuleta. “It’s something that dragged on too long.”

For the teachers who never got their bonuses, this has been dragging on since last summer.

The five-year teacher incentive program started in the 2006-07 school year and was funded mostly through federal Education Department grants for the first four years. In year five, the 2010-11 school year, the District was to pay 75 percent of the cost to employees in the incentive fund program, with the rest coming from the federal money, which was disbursed through the Network.

“Looking five years ahead, they made that commitment, and that’s really being optimistic,” said Blea.

However, for the fifth year, the Federal money never came. According to Goodmacher the government pulled out because of violations to the terms of the project.

There were two specific reasons for the government’s abandonment of the project, Goodmacher said. First, the District failed to prove that teachers’ compensation was based primarily on student achievement gains and on multiple classroom evaluations. Secondly, it allowed state-mandated increases in teachers’ pay due to their attainment of more advanced licenses to count as the District’s required match for the federal incentive funds.

With the government money gone, the District didn’t have nearly enough in its budget to cover its share. The District’s budget only had $335,000 left for the incentive payments by the end of the year, according to previous Rio Grande SUN reports.

Louis McGill
Rio Grande Sun
505-753-2126
lpmcgill@riograndesun.com