San Antonio Independent School District trustees met for most of the day Saturday for a broad-ranging discussion, including how to proceed with a proposed school closures plan.
(Get up to date here.)
Trustees met with and received feedback from their constituents since deciding on May 18 that they were going to review the plan and make tweaks before it would be ready to take to the general public for input.
Board President James Howard said he hopes to have a plan to take to the community by the end of July. Between now and then, the district administration will work with members of the community-based committee that drafted the original proposal to revise it based on the long list of proposed changes trustees gave staff.
A new plan is due to the board by June 19.
Saturday’s approximately six-hour meeting also included a salary proposal for next school year. Steven Bassett, the district’s chief financial officer, pitched a plan that would give teachers an average 4.9 percent pay increase in 2009-2010 and all other employees a 4 percent increase — 4 percent not of their current salaries but of their “mid-point” salary, the salary that is in the middle of their pay schedule.
(Full budget presentation here.)
Employees haven’t had an an increase since July 2006. The raise would be contingent on receiving additional state money under school funding legislation debated by a committee with representatives from both chambers on Saturday. The legislative session ends Monday.
In the short-term, the plan would raise the starting teacher salary to $43,025 next year to become more competitive with surrounding districts. Long-term, the district wants to boost the annual starting salary to $50,000 by 2013-2014 — a proposal that came up last year but went nowhere.
Superintendent Robert Duron also mentioned a long-term plan to implement a pay-for- performance system. Such plans are typically opposed by teachers’ groups, with sticking points being what factors to use in deciding how to hand out the money and how to make it fair.
Trustees also voted to allow Duron to finalize an agreement to lease space to a charter school operator for the Alameda School for the Arts + Design, a Henry Ford Academy school. The school, which would open in the fall, would be housed at Bowie Elementary, one of six schools that closed at the end of last year.
Details of the agreement weren’t readily available Saturday, but I will find out more. Generally, district spokeswoman Leslie Price said that SAISD would benefit by being able to offer the charter school’s curriculum in its high schools.
Charter schools are one of the district’s biggest competitors, and at least one trustee has said the district declined to partner with a different charter school last year for that reason. How will this arrangement be different?
