Two sides warring over a contract for Denver’s teachers took their arguments to a neutral citizens panel Thursday morning, laying out their differences on the district’s compensation system.
A major sticking point on the contract impasse is ProComp — the 2-year-old incentive system for teachers supported by an annual $25 million tax.
Thursday’s meeting with members of the A-Plus citizens committee revealed the nuances of each side’s position.
“This is a values clash,” said Van Schoales, an A-Plus committee member and education expert with the Piton Foundation. “The disagreement is whether the $25 million should be distributed equally among teachers or differentiated in some way or another.”
In a nutshell, the district says it must beef up pay to beginning and mid-career teachers in order to keep them. Too many are leaving.
DPS officials say too much money is being banked in the ProComp trust and there is an inequity in pay for veterans compared with their junior counterparts.
The district says its offer would boost the average salary for a new teacher from $35,500 to $44,000.
Union officials disagree, saying teachers leave because of the challenging working environment. The district’s offer is more like $37,000 for a new teacher, union officials say, because the district’s figures include bonuses that don’t go to all teachers.
The union’s offer is to gradually and equitably build the salary base with a 3.5 percent pay increase across the board, as well as bonuses.
The union, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, wants the system to be studied for another year to determine the effectiveness before radical changes are made.
This conflict is part of the design of ProComp, said Phil Gonring, senior program officer at Rose Community Foundation and co-author of a book on the creation of ProComp, “Pay-for-Performance Teacher Compensation: An Inside View of Denver’s ProComp Plan.”
The system was set up for changes to be discussed after Oct. 1, 2007, and Oct. 1, 2010, and again in December 2013. The idea, Gonring said, is that the system could be refined to make it more effective over the years.
“We knew that we would have challenges and the union and school district would be in conflict over changes,” Gonring said. “As a community we should rally around the conflict.”
The meeting of administrators from Denver Public Schools and officials with the Denver Classroom Teachers Association was before a subcommittee of A-Plus Denver — a blue-ribbon panel that provides oversight on education issues.
The committee will reconvene in two weeks to ask further questions and possibly make recommendations to help bring the two sides together.
Jeremy P. Meyer: 303-954-1367 or jpmeyer@denverpost.com
