POTTSTOWN >> School board president Kim Stilwell fired back Thursday night after months of teachers complaining publicly about their pay as contract talks continue.
“As much as I like to see the teachers and the parents at the meetings to strengthen their cause for pay raises, is it really time well spent?” Stilwell asked to a growing chorus of groans and exclamations from the green-shirted teachers in the audience.
Stilwell had just offered up a handful of examples of teacher pay increases in contract steps over the last seven years, ranging from 3.3 percent for less-experienced teachers to as much as 60.6 percent for those in the upper steps.
“You are all aware of our issues with our broken funding system and the issues in this town which we are trying to correct,” said Stilwell.
“I would so rather see you all at the table with me and other board members, working with PCCY and the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools on a plan to try to make the legislators help us. I would rather see your time here spent gathering signatures or asking the people in the town you live in to get involved, or at least send a post card to their legislator,” Stilwell said.
Contrary to her inference, Stilwell may be unaware that dozens of teachers did exactly as she asked this month, attending the May 4 “Walk-In” rally at Pottstown High School organized by Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, at which Beth Yoder, president of the Federation of Pottstown Teachers, was one of four keynote speakers. The only member of the board to speak at the rally was Emanuel Wilkerson.
Stilwell was not present.Yoder and her fellow federation members – all of whom were once-again clad in identical green t-shirts – did not take kindly to Stilwell’s comments.
“This is inspiring… Makes me feel heard and valued (sarcasm),” tweeted middle school teacher and federation vice president Mike DiDonato. “We continue to be belittled and demoralized.”
In his comments to the board as federation representative, DiDonato also said it is “demoralizing” for teachers to see constant raises for administrators, but always being told at the bargaining table that there is no money for teacher raises.
The latest example of that came Thursday when Stilwell proposed that Stephen Rodriguez – who has agreed to serve as interim superintendent while the board continues its search to replace the retiring Jeff Sparagana – have his salary raised from $500 a day to $625 per day when he takes the post.
Yoder was quick to point out on Twitter that, if enacted, Rodriguez will be making more money per day than Sparagana: “Dr. Sparagana’s current salary of $617 daily with 4yrs exp. Interim Rodriguez proposed to make $625/day. No words…”
“Here are some facts,” Yoder further tweeted from the federation Twitter account. “There has been no new money added to our salary schedule in years.”
She explained that means that although teachers may get raises as a result of moving upward in the salary steps over the years, the amount of money in those steps has remained stagnant.
However, the fact that those steps most reward those at the top of the scale has also been added as an ingredient in the debate.
In a paid advertisement published in Thursday’s print edition of The Mercury, school board member Thomas Hylton included a chart comparing salaries in Pottstown with those in neighboring Pottsgrove and Owen J. Roberts school districts.
The chart shows that while OJR salaries are consistently higher until the top step, both Pottsgrove and OJR salaries “increase rather evenly as teachers move up the ladder,” Hylton wrote.
“At Pottstown, however, salaries barely move for many years, and then leap by almost $20,000 in just the last two years,” he wrote. “Who thought it was a good idea to handsomely reward teachers at the top at the expense of everyone else? Not the school board.”
Hylton has proposed that the board revisit the idea of offering a $10,000 “forgivable loan” to teachers who live in the borough for five years, something which would have to be agreed to by the federation at the bargaining table as part of the contract.
He said Allentown is currently making a similar offer to police officers who live in certain neighborhoods and that Borough Manager Mark Flanders told him that a similar offer is being considered for police who live here in Pottstown.
But one long-time teacher and federation representative, Lindi Vollmuth, said things are too bad, and becoming worse, for anything to convince her to stay.
Ending each criticism of the district with the phrase “and so, I am going,” Vollmuth said, “I have heard this board say that my 30 years of experience and pursuit of knowledge to make me a better teacher has no value and as someone at the top of the pay scale, I do not deserve a salary increase,” Vollmuth said.
“Yet I have watched as incremental and exorbitant raises are given to administrators who have not seen students in years and are seen as ineffective by those of us who have,” she said, adding she does not “trust the judgment” of her building principal.
She referred to teachers with so many bruises from students a dress fitter thought she was the victim of domestic abuse; students who misbehave with no consequences, and an evaluation system “based on a high-stakes test I am not allowed to see and written by non-educators.”
“Each day, one of my students wears a sweatshirt that says ‘don’t know, don’t care.’ This seems to be the attitude of many,” Vollmuth said.
The next meeting of the school board is Monday, May 23 at 7 p.m. in the high school cafeteria.
