McKeesport Teachers Without a Contract Because of Bad Business Manager or Bad Faith School Board?
Which is it?
Does McKeesport Area School District (MASD) have a terrible business manager or a regressive school board?
School directors and the teachers had agreed to a new contract, but the board tabled it in June after concerns that the western Pennsylvania district didn’t have the money to pay for moderate raises.
Then the board skipped the entire month of July without a meeting. Which is fine if you don’t have any pressing business left unfinished, but I guess the livelihoods of hundreds of employees don’t count.
Now classes are set to begin on Aug. 21, yet the board is no closer to solving the problem.
At a school directors’ meeting last week, the board mostly blamed Business Manager Scott Domowicz.
“A contract was negotiated with ineptitude, and we cannot afford it,” said board member Matthew Holtzman. “Our business manager did not negotiate well. We don’t have the money to cover this.”
No board members sat on the negotiating committee? You just left it all up to the business manager?
“This board wants to give the teachers the raises, we can’t afford it,” board member Joseph Lopretto said. “Taxpayers will be looking at a 30% raise in their property taxes over five years.”
Where did you get that percentage from exactly? What are the exact figures, the exact cost?
All of which really comes down to the question – how is this possible!?
The pay raises in the proposed contract are not extravagant and the district does not pay as much as nearby districts.
Over five years, the proposed pay increases are: 6.11% in 2023-24, 6.59% in 2024-25, 6.03% in 2025-26, 4.38% in 2026-27, and 3.26% in 2027-28.
“This contract was offered to us. We accepted this contract. It was not the numbers we wanted, but it’s the numbers that were given to us, and that’s what we went with,” said Gerald McGrew president of the McKeesport Area Education Association (MAEA).
“At the end of five years, our highest salary is still not at some of the local district highest salary now. The parents and the kids are the ones being affected mostly by this.”
So how can this happen?
Can a business manager – a person responsible for a district’s finances – negotiate a contract without a full understanding of what the district can and cannot afford!?
Domowicz was hired in late February 2022 at an annual salary of $100,000. He had been the business manager at Spectrum Charter School in Monroeville for about a year. Before that he was Senior Management Consultant for two decades at Great Lakes Management Consulting, a firm offering accounting and tax preparation services to customers and small business owners in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
Spectrum Charter School is much smaller than MASD. The privatized school employs 11-20 people and has $1 million to $5 million in annual revenue. MASD has roughly 3,000 students and 300 teachers with a proposed budget of $86 million next year.
The previous Business Manager Joan Wehner had more experience in the education field. She was assistant to the business manager at Penn-Trafford School District for 10 years before coming to McKeesport. She left the district to become business manager at Greensburg Salem School District.
However, could Domowicz really be so clueless about MASD finances to negotiate a contract with the teachers that the district could not pay?
He certainly seemed on top of district finances at the board’s May meeting where he discussed the 2023-24 budget.
Domowicz said next year’s total proposed budget is for $86 million with an approximate fund balance of $10.6 million. This is an increase from the $79.8 million budget approved by the board for 2022-23.
Even though this years budget has a fund balance for the future, expenses are rising.
“Contractual labor agreements and additional staffing represents an increase in payroll expenses of 8 percent,” Domowicz said.
“There (have) been a lot of labor market pressures making recruitment and retention difficult without making some market adjustments to what we are offering in starting salaries. And there (has) been a decline in the median income of the families that we support with the district.”
This does not sound like someone ignorant of the issues.
He even noted that charter school costs were one of the leading causes of financial increases. Every child living in the district who goes to a charter school takes away funding that would have gone to fund MASD. The district paid $2 million toward charter school tuition in 2006-07, which has risen to $14 million in 2022-23.
If this continues, Domowicz said he expects the district will need to pay $16 million next year. That’s 17 percent of the new budget going toward charter schools.
If Domowicz’s figures were accurate all along, why is the school board suddenly refusing to approve the contract with the teachers it had originally offered?
In today’s increasingly anti-intellectual and anti-teacher environment, it is no stretch of the imagination to see why.
The entire country is in the midst of a national educator walk out. Teachers are refusing to stay in the classroom due to poor salary, poor working conditions, heavy expectations and lack of tools or respect.
After decades of neglect only made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re missing almost a million teachers.
Nationwide, we only have about 3.2 million teachers left!
Finding replacements has been difficult. Across the country, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available.
Not only are teachers paid 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experience, but a 2020 survey found that 67% of teachers have or had a second job to make ends meet.
And now MASD school board is refusing to approve very reasonable raises for educators who have given everything to the district and its children.
This is my school district where my family was educated, where I graduated and where my daughter still attends. I’ve seen so many fine educators give up the ghost and leave the classroom for better opportunities elsewhere.
If MASD school directors don’t do something to solve this problem, we will only lose more talented and experienced teachers. The quality of education will fall further while charter schools gobble up even more of our tax dollars. This means devaluing our properties and paying even higher taxes.
No one wants a tax increase.
The median income in the district is about $34,379, according to Domowicz. The community cannot afford to waste its declining tax revenue.
School directors need to either prove that the business manager they hired is incompetent and replace him – or prioritize educators when writing their budgets. You can’t have an excellent school without excellent teachers. And you can’t have excellent teachers – especially in a time of shortage – without paying them a fair wage.
Even though many school boards don’t have a meeting in July, perhaps MASD directors shouldn’t have done the same without a solution ready in August. That kind of disrespect is just asking for educators to strike – though the MAEA has not threatened to do so.
It is a shame that we are even in this position.
US schools should not have to rely on local tax revenues to fund neighborhood schools. Rich communities can afford to give their children the best of everything and poorer ones like McKeesport have to make do with whatever they can scrape together.
This is not how other modern countries do it. Internationally, schools are more often funded by state or federal governments so that all children get equitable resources. And charter schools do not even exist in many modern nations. However, until our own regressive governments catch up with the rest of the world, it is up to our duly elected representatives at home to get down to work and make sure all our children have the best we can provide.
School directors, no more excuses. Get to work.
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