PHOENIX — Arizona schools have not lived up to the 2018 school year promise to increase teacher pay by 20% by this past year.
A new report by the state Auditor General’s Office found statewide average salaries are up just 16.5%, or $7,977 a year. And just 87 of the 205 school districts actually hit or exceeded that 20% figure.
That 20% pay hike was based on a promise made by Gov. Doug Ducey following weeks of protests and walkout threats by teachers after the governor’s initial budget proposed just a 1% increase. But Auditor General Lindsey Perry said there are various possibilities about why the actual spending fell short.
One, she said, is that funds were distributed to districts based on the number of students and not how much each district would need to increase its average pay by 20%. So a district where salaries were lower than average got proportionately more cash for each teacher.
Closely related is what Perry called “changes in teacher population.”
“For example, most districts that had a decrease in average teacher salary also had a decrease in average years of teacher experience,” she explained. That’s because less experienced teachers are often paid less than those with more experience.
The annual report also measures the percentage of each dollar given to schools that winds up in what is classified as instruction.
For the last full school year, that rose a bit, to 55.3%, up four-tenths of a point. And that compares with 53.5% statewide when the percentage hit bottom in 2016.
But Perry noted the figure is still below 57.7%, what it was when her agency started doing this report.
Still, that instruction figure does not paint the whole picture of what is effectively going into the classroom.
Student support, consisting of counselors, audiologists, speech pathologist, nurses, social workers and attendance services ate up another 9.1% of every dollar.
And there was 5.8% for instructional support, defined as librarians, teacher training, curriculum development and instruction-related technology services. That brought what she considers total classroom spending up to 70.2% versus 69.3% the prior year.
What’s left is 10.4% for administration. That includes superintendents, principals, business managers and other staff who do everything from accounting to payroll.
Schools also spent an average of 11.7% on building maintenance, equipment repair and the costs to heat and cool buildings.
There also was 4.0% for food service and 3.7% for the cost of operating the school bus fleet.
On that last point, Perry said the COVID pandemic had some effect.
She said some districts continued to transport students, but with much lower ridership. And she said others did not transport any students at all but instead used bus routes to drop off meals and homework packets to students.
The report also found the average class size dropped from 18 to 17 students, a possible side effect of lower student attendance during the pandemic. Overall, she said, the number of students in public schools dropped by about 50,000, or 6% from the prior year, “which is the largest year-to-year change n students attending since 2011.”
That decline, Perry said also affected what each school district collected, as state aid is based on attendance. But she said districts benefited with a large influx of COVID-relief dollars.
Perry said her auditors identified a number of inefficient practices that exist at some schools.
One of the largest is operating schools far below designed capacity and maintaining excess space.
She also said some districts spent more than necessary on non-instructional staffing, either with too many people or paying employees for hours not worked.
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