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Why don't we pay teachers more? This is a question we hear almost every single day, and it's a valid one after all. Teachers are important because they guide us in learning and help us develop new skills. They also inspire us to explore our interests and reach our full potential. So why is it so hard to pay them more?

First to understand that, we must understand how budgets work. I'm going to take a dive into the truth. In the realm of education, school budgets take center stage, shaping how funds are distributed. These financial plans raise important questions about fairness, access, and achieving educational goals.

Where does the money come from? School funding derives from various sources, primarily including government allocations, local property taxes, and sometimes federal grants. These financial streams converge to create the budget that supports educational programs. Teacher salaries. maintenance and student resources.

Joining us to talk about this is Thomas Trippany, who was an assistant principal for 11 years and head principal for 12 years. The school district allocates different funds to different categories. So they may do a certain amount of money towards instruction, a certain amount of money towards that's it's mostly an instructional stuff, but there's different, some of it will go towards language art.

So there's math. Sometimes science. Sometimes there's there's an Eisenhower grant that drops money into science. We get an amount that goes into what we call our general fund and we have a lot of flexibility with what we buy in that. Let's say we wanted to reward the teachers after testing with a breakfast or during testing with.

With breakfast sandwiches, we could use the general fund for that if we wanted to buy computers or whatever we wanted to use. It was just no very few rules that are associated with the general fund. As long as it's educationally based and you can't, you can only spend. A certain percentage of your money on food, which I believe is 10%.

So you guys stay under 10% of that on food. But if you needed something for your playground or a school sign, electronic sign or something like that, you use a general fund and we have a bookkeeper. And she keeps track of, all the different spots that it's pretty sophisticated software system.

We use it's called PeopleSoft, so the chorus, there's this, there's a fund for see what else that we have. There's so many different areas, there's probably 6 or 7 different areas. And then, from my point of view, I would have a pie graph and I can see how much we're spending in each area or also how much is left in each area.

And, hopefully you're spending the most of it in instruction. Also joining us is Billy Coxhead, who is a CFO at a private school and has been doing it for 26 years. And again, being a private school roughly 92% of our revenue, if you want to call it that, is tuition. So families paying tuition represents 92% of our revenue.

And then the other 8% comes from contributions. And that can either be. What we call the annual fund. Basically, parent, we're asking them to answer once they pay tuition, they still get asked to contribute, which they can get a charity reduction for contribute to the annual fund. And then we also as families to contribute to our endowment and we build up an endowment and so we'll get some.

Earnings off our endowment. So the other eight percent is contributions and endowment, but endowment doesn't create get created on its own It's got to be started with contributions just a little slightly different and whether you spend it Immediately or try to allow that to grow so 92 percent tuition eight percent contributions How much of the money gets allocated toward payroll?

Staff salaries are the single biggest expense in every school's budget. NCES reports that in a typical district budget, 90% is reserved for salary and benefits. According to blog. oliveau. com That's a common question and the round number is 75%. Of our budget is payroll and benefits. We also wrap in benefits as part of the compensation package and the major benefits are retirement contributions.

Health insurance are the two main ones. We got some other ancillary ones, but those are the two main things. And health insurance is obviously really expensive and a concern for everybody. And anyway, that's a big part of the benefit package. But anyway. 75% goes to payroll and benefits. So the way our school district is huge, we're the 12th and 13th largest in the nation.

So the overall budget for the district is allocated. I believe in the eighties it's over 80%, somewhere between 80 and 85% of the district's budget is for that, but we don't actually. Pay the teachers, they get their money from the district. We get what's called points. So we don't actually have a spending limit as a, a numerical spending limit as far as money goes.

Based on our school size we get. Allocations and it's through our funding, we get allocated a certain amount of points. So maybe my school, we had about 750 kids. So let's say we might get about 55 points or something like that. So teachers 1 point pair professionals half a point and an instructional clerk would be a point for and assistant principal will be a 1.

25. so that was our budget. So it wasn't a financial budget and the beauty of that is we can get the most experienced teachers with the highest degrees in it and it has no impact. On how we are spending pretty much so it's where a lot of schools. I know, they get a certain amount of money and they're penalized.

So to speak, if they hire teachers who are 30 years with a doctorate, and that's going to, that's almost the same as 2 teachers probably. And we don't have to. Fool around with that. So there's also the Title I budget. I don't know if you want to go get into that or not. Title I budget is it's a federal program for schools who have a higher poverty level to to give them an advantage.

We don't have I was a Title I school, so we didn't, we were about, generally most years we were around 73, 74% free and reduced lunch. Each district has different cut scores, which qualify them for the title one. When I first started in the district, that number was around 30 in the low thirties, around 30%.

And you qualify now it's in the sixties, 60% or so to qualify for the Title one funds. School, my size and my district would get about a quarter million dollars once a year. And we would, I would spend it. Almost always the majority of it on staff. We would get what they call carry over money, which was any money that wasn't spent, in the district, we would get a little boost and the district had to hold back a certain amount of money.

So we would get another. 50, 000 to 70, 000 in the fall, and I would use that for stuff like programs, software programs, and then I'd have school programs, remedial programs, before school programs at the time, most of my career, we needed computers, and I would just supply the computer for all the students, so that's not an issue that we have, but.

With that spending at quarter million dollars sounds like a lot thinking, Oh, teacher salary, 50 grand starting. It's doesn't go as far as you think, because you also have to buy their benefits and the benefits packages is very expensive. It's not just their health insurance. It's their sick days.

It's the retirement. There's a lot of things that go into that. 50, 000 teacher, my class check 75, 000. So the benefit package is another 25, 000. So before you know it, that money's gone and, usually I could get about four teachers. How much money is spent per student? Nationally, public school spending per student experienced the largest fiscal year to year increase since 2008, to 14, 347, according to new data from the 2021 annual survey of school system finances, according to census.

gov. Again, a lot of it's based on points, so it's not like a cash value, the, it's not just the body, the warm body. It's also what the student, does he have a disability, so different disabilities qualify you for more, different amounts, what they call it and that gives you more credit, so to speak, as far as your funding goes, which translates into those staffing points.

For the most part, our budget in dollars for those things that we spent, for the most part, that's pretty much just per student. But for our staffing. There's a lot of different things, gifted. How are you serving these students? Are they with a gifted teacher all day? Are they with an ESL teacher all day?

The more segments that they are with a certified or endorsed teacher that specializes in whatever their needs are and what they qualify for, you would tend to get more funding for that. And, parents think, oh, you're trying to get my kid. No, we don't get cash. It's just helps us get more. Staff that helps them, it has smaller group.

Okay. Yeah, and it's not like that for the public We don't have any kind of calculations on how much we're spending per student When we build the budget It's more of a what are the needs for next year? How much do we need to pay our teachers? Give them a raise sometime, hopefully trying to outpace inflation.

And then. What are the other budgetary items that we need to run the school? Landscaping, athletics, fine arts text and teaching materials, whatever. And we roll it up that way and say, okay, these are all our expenses. What is the tuition to cover this whole thing? And so once we get that number, we also build it in.

We have to obviously project the number of students. And the big budgetary item is, the number of students and then how many, how much do we have to charge those students to cover the expenses. In one sense, you could say that the tuition per student is a rough estimate of the cost per student, but we don't view it that way.

Because, our budgetary students, we have four tuition levels, and that's what complicates the things a little bit. Kindergarten is one tuition band, first grade through fourth grade is another tuition band, fifth and sixth grade is a tuition band, and seventh through twelfth grade is another tuition band.

We build it by number of students that we expect we're going to get. Here are all our expenses. How much do we need to charge in order to cover all this? Who has the final say on budget decision? In my school system, we really have a lot of autonomy as the principal. As long as we're, we don't have a reputation for, making bad choices.

They give us a lot of flexibility. I hire who I want to hire, it's still ultimately is the board's decision, but they don't really go through it all. We interview, we send them through HR, the HR approves it essentially, but they don't interview them or no one else interviews them.

They just make sure that they don't have, they have to go through background check to make sure their credentials are exactly what they said on their resume, those types of things. But as far as that goes, and as far as the spending goes yeah we do. We do when we do purchase orders, we have to have those approved.

My bookkeeper will put it in and I approve it. And then it goes to the district finance department and then they approve it. But generally everything runs smoothly. There's not really any hiccups in there unless you're. Again, doing something that you're not supposed to. There's a certain amount where you're not supposed to spend over without permission and initial permission.

I can't think of, that's a pretty, it's either five or ten thousand dollars that you have to get a special process for that. And that was pretty rare that I had to do that. Okay, since we are private school, basically the bulk of the work of collecting the data and presenting the information falls on me.

But we obviously have a head of school that is obviously integral part of this. But we also have a board of trustees. They're all volunteers. Many of them are parents of the school, but not all of them. And they make the final say. But a subset of that board of trustees is a finance committee, and so that's where the bulk of the actual work goes on.

We'll have a marathon finance committee meeting at budget time going over all the assumptions that I have put in, which I've gotten information from admissions, the head of school, whatever, and we'll show it to the finance committee, and we'll actually run iterations of different scenarios of number of students, tuition increase, compensation increase, and there's certainly a little bit of an art in addition to a science put into it, but anyway, the finance committee makes a recommendation to the full board and the full board is the one that approves.

What is surprisingly a huge expense? I would say paper and copy accounts so your copy machines. And the amount of clicks. So even though you may do a two sided copy and you're saving money on paper, it counts as two clicks. And the maintenance agreements through these copy contractors, they charge you by the click.

So it's a certain amount. It's two clicks. And the amount, even though we're so digital now, it's amazing. How many how much paper that we use? It's better than it was, but it's still pretty high. It's just unbelievable. And in our school was a decent size compared to a lot of schools in the country is small for my district, probably in the bottom 10 percentile as far as.

Size, nationally is probably one of the bigger ones. It's seven 50, but our schools are more usually a little closer to a thousand for an elementary level. But yeah, that, that is, it's a ridiculous amount. Wow. No, that's a great question. And the initial answers are security.

And that has become more and more important and a greater and greater dollar value over the last 5 10 years. Especially with this last shooting, school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, that was a very close like school two hours. And so that made a lot of people anxious about well, what are we doing?

Could we prevent something like that? And you can't prevent everything, but it is putting a heightened awareness on security. And so we spent a lot of money on security. In terms of Cameras, even though that doesn't stop any coming in, but we have two police officers that we pay to be on our campus from 7 a.

m. to 6 p. m. every day a school is in session. But, in terms of entrance to the doors, we got to have access to the doors. Nobody can get in. All the doors are locked. You have some kind of access, somebody key. And anyway, the point of it is security is a big expense that used to not be and then the second one is technology and trying to provide students with current technology to prepare them for college and beyond.

And so that just feels like a black hole is sometimes the amount of money that we spend for in classroom instruction that involves technology. Can teachers get paid more? Boy, that is a, yeah, that's the 100, 000 question right there. Is it really? Okay long term. If a school like Wesleyan were trying to solve that problem, we would have find a benefactor who would donate 50 million to the school's endowment.

to fund teacher salaries. And so that would allow us to use earnings off the endowment in perpetuity to pay teachers more. Now that is, the odds of that happening are low. But the other side of it is, oh, we have to keep raising tuition. to pay teachers more. And there are limits on what, how much you can charge in tuition before you run everybody off.

Even the top 1%. Eventually you're gonna, it's not gonna pay any more intuition. So it, there's nothing that we've got that would solve that instantaneously. So we do. Again, with the biggest part of our budget already going to comp and benefits to find, to pay people more, we gotta raise tuition more, and there are only levels, certain limits. We got limits on that. So again, apart from somebody just dumping an endowment number on us that we could then use I don't see I don't know how to do it. We're already allocating a huge part of our budget to teacher salaries. Of course we wish we could pay, the teachers a lot more.

They really work hard. It's it's until you've walked in their shoes, you don't know what they go through. There's so many, different moving parts. Not only do they have, 20 to 30 joining us to talk about this is Thomas Trippen, who was an assistant principal for 11 years and head principal for 12 years, professional development.

Also joining us is Billy Cox, who is a C F O at a private school and has been doing it for 26 years. Everything that, a parent would be, they're that at school and sometimes they're that because that parent. Is not there or maybe grandparents raising him. So the job and the stress and the pressure, a lot of teachers have a hard time sleeping at night because of all the different things that they're thinking about.

Did my child did my student get home? Were they, were they safe when they got there? Was there abuse? If they're worried about, giving them. Sending home a note because they're afraid they might get beat, and come back with Who knows what type of marks or injuries?

So the the districts have to you know, depend on really It's really economy driven. So the better the tax base or they hire the millage rate Is the better the opportunities for schools and teachers to get raised? So if communities want More money for their teachers, it would be best if they lobbied for higher taxes on their property taxes and stuff like that.

Sometimes the rich get richer, the better the school system, it attracts businesses and the more businesses that also raises the tax rate. Some of your big cities, they've got an enormous amount of tax rates because they've got an airport there. They've got, conferences that go on with all the hotels and all that generates extra funds that ends up trickling into the schools.

A well run county makes a huge difference in the amount of money that comes into the school. What is something everyone should understand when it comes to school budget? One thing I would say is that sometimes they get a little bit... Work up about small potatoes. In other words, our budget and our district is over 2 billion and they get upset when, the superintendent is making an extra whatever amount of money.

And it's really small potatoes or the district spends this and, most everything that's done is done for a very good reason and they have to understand that in the grand scheme of things, a couple of extra school resource officer is not going to yeah. Break the budget. There's a lot of need for, school police and their presence.

And also, they work very hard, our school resource officers, on building building their brand, so to speak, and building relationships with the students. So when they encounter police on the outside of the school, they feel comfortable approaching them and not afraid of them. Yeah that tuition does not cover 100% of the school's budget or cover 100% of the school's expense.

And even though it's 92%, roughly, and that seems like a lot, there's still, it still doesn't cover everything. And so we're still looking for ways to balance the budget outside of tuition. Therefore, it's gifts and contributions allow us to do that. Barring that, we would have to cut.

Expenses and based on the school population and what we're trying to do to attract students. That's a tough one, too. So what would people know? Tuition doesn't cover everything. Thank you for watching T F D. Deep dives for more episodes like this one. Please make sure to like or follow reporting to you from Fairview Heights, Illinois.

I am Ben from T F D. Deep dive.