BOSTON – According to a new report from the Boston Business Journal, the city of Westfield’s teachers earn below the Commonwealth of Massachusetts median salary.
The report found the average annual salary in 2013 for a Bay State teacher to be $69,000, up from $61,000 just five years ago. Top median earners taught in the Concord-Carlisle School District, with Lincoln-Sudbury in second, and Sherborn rounding out the top three.
These three wealthy eastern Mass. districts, all located in Middlesex County, paid their educators $95,947, $94,087 and $91,848 respectively, with Concord-Carlisle increasing their median pay rate by $2,235 from 2012. The district, ranked number one for the second straight year, currently employs 90 teachers.
Their 29 percent increase in median income over the past five years is far from shocking according to the report, which states that every district in the state with the exception of 20 have given teachers raises over the last five years.
Meanwhile, the 450 teachers employed in the Westfield School District took in a median salary of $66,698, placing them 220 in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a jump from 255 in 2012.
Westfield’s teachers saw a six percent increase in pay from 2012, when their median salary was $62,658, and a 23 percent jump in their earnings from 2008, when district teachers brought home $54,058 a year.
The report indicates that Westfield lost 12 teachers from 2012, and has seen a decline since 2008, when there were 510 teachers employed by the district.
Westfield School Superintendent Dr. Suzanne Scallion said that the numbers are “misleading.”
“(The) median is a tricky way to look at salaries, because you’re looking at the middle salaries, where half are above and half are below,” she said. “It’s an odd number to look at. It’s skewed.”
Scallion attributed Westfield’s data to the age composition of the district’s teachers.
“We have a senior staff because we’ve had significant layoffs over the past three years since I’ve been here,” she said, adding that she didn’t know whether that was the case prior to her arrival. “I think there were some years where the budget had significant money from the federal and state government, money that had dried up the year before I arrived.”
Scallion said that it was right around the time of the country’s economic collapse that city funds began to decline, as well.
“Folks that were funded under those (federal and state) grants were let go, and then it was local money that began to decline,” she said. “Clearly our younger teachers on the lower end of the salaries were the ones who were laid off, and that will skew your numbers.”
“Our teachers have had raises, but they haven’t been that significant,” she said. “In the next couple of years they’re going to get more significant. Next year I believe is a two percent, and then a three percent.”
“We have trimmed our staff, and we have to be realstic and honest about that,” Scallion said. “When you’re laying off staff, you’re always cutting least senior staff who have lower salaries. So what you’re left with are staff with significantly higher salaries.”
Lori Hovey, a teacher at North Middle School and president of the Westfield Education Association, agreed with Scallion that the numbers aren’t indicative of what is really going on within the district’s teaching ranks.
“When looking at these figures, they don’t compare apples to apples,” said Hovey, adding that the WEA’s Unit A, made up of it’s teachers and staff, currently has 565 members. “All of those numbers (in the report) are two years old. The information that comes out of the DESE (Department of Elementary and Secondary Education) is not current.”
Hovey stated that when the DESE calculates median salary, there are several factors that the organization doesn’t take into consideration.
“When we went into negotiation, we had the salaries of all the surrounding communities with like demographics – Agawam, Chicopee, West Springfield, Southwick – and, at that point in time, we had nine surrounding communities. We were ninth out of nine,” she said. “When the state figures out the median salary, they’re not talking average salary. If you have a faculty that is veteran like Westfield, I’m going to say that 80 percent of our faculty is on step 13.”
Hovey, who teaches language arts at North, said that the degree status of the district’s teachers is far more advanced as a whole than those of surrounding communities.
“Masters degree, masters plus 30, plus 45, plus 60, and doctorates,” she said. “We have a huge percentage – roughly 90 percent – of our faculty have a masters degree or better. We’re top heavy, we look really good on paper when you start looking at medians.”
“Am I upset that we went up? No, because we’ve been at the bottom for quite some time,” she said. “Given that we were able to negotiate what I consider to be a fair contract after what had been negotiated over the last three to six years, it’s about time that we started coming up. Westfield is a great place to work – great kids, great faculty and staff.”
“In fairness to our taxpayers, when one compares income, we should also look at the entire employment package which includes active and retirement health benefits and severance,” said Westfield Mayor and School Committee Chairman Daniel M. Knapik. “When you add that in, Westfield’s total employment package is significantly better than our peer communities, and all of these benefits, of course, are paid by our taxpayers.”
