Delaware Education Funding: Teacher Salaries For District & Charters By Student
Teacher Salaries. This is the bulk of the costs in education. As it should be. Teachers are the lifeblood of a child’s education. The funding for teachers should always be the highest cost for any school, whether it is in a district school or a charter school. With that being said, below are what our districts and charter schools pay for teachers. But as with the article on overall spending, it is all in relation to how many students a district or charter has. There are several opinions that can be drawn from these pictures, but as with all these articles, the percentage of high-needs students can play a huge factor, especially when it comes to special education. But we can see, based on the numbers, that having too many new teachers may save money in the short-term but it doesn’t bode well for students.
With this article, we have the first charter schools to suffer from what I call BAP: Bad Accounting Practices. Delaware Military Academy and Delaware College Prep are not included in this because it would be impossible to figure out their teacher salaries. For the sole reason that they put ALL their salaries under a code of “General Salaries”. There is no breakdown of teacher, principal, head of school, secretaries, and so forth. I know their authorizer, Red Clay, has approached them about this with absolutely no change whatsoever. And Del. Military Academy already had a run-in with the State Auditor a few years back over personal spending. Del. College Prep had their charter revoked by the Red Clay board and closed at the end of June.
Before you react to the first picture, I would like to remind everyone that the number of students in each district is the biggest factor in all of this. Some district and charter accounting gurus may look at these and think I have all my numbers wrong. If they are looking at just the state code that falls under teacher salaries, most of them would be right. But for the purposes of this article and to get a true understanding of how teachers are paid overall in our districts and charters, I added the following together to come up with the teacher salaries: teacher salaries, academic excellence (essentially a bonus for some teachers), what are known as Extra Pay for Extra Responsibility categories (Sports, Extra-Curricular, and Misc.), Visiting Teachers, and the three Related Services for special education that only about half the districts use for special education teachers (Basic, Intensive, and Complex). There is absolutely no way to determine how many teachers are tenured or have more experience at each district or charter. But these are straight-out salaries and do Delaware Education Funding: Teacher Salaries For District & Charters By Student – Exceptional Delaware:
