Kent Education Association

Why should our community be concerned about teachers’ pay?

Of course educators need to be able to afford to live in our community, and pay their bills, and raise their families. The amount teachers earn is also a concrete way the district expresses its respect for our professional skills. But equally important, pay is a key yardstick for Kent’s ability to compete in hiring and keeping great teachers, which is the most important factor schools can influence to improve every child’s education.

The numbers are grim. We rank 80^th statewide in pay for new teachers. We’re behind Seattle and Bellevue and Snohomish and Lake Washington and Mukilteo. We trail Edmonds, Everett, Mercer Island, Tukwila, Issaquah, Shoreline, Northshore, Renton, Auburn, Federal Way and Tacoma. But we’ve also fallen behind lesser powerhouses. The pay for new teachers in Kent ranks below Sultan. Granite Falls. Lakewood. Enumclaw. In Blaine, on the rural border with Canada, the district has made teacher pay a greater priority than in Kent. So has White River. Wapato. Dieringer. Even tiny communities like Orting, Crescent, Mabton and Ridgefield have found the resources to pay their teachers more than in Kent. Fair pay can be a priority, in districts large or small.

For our most-experienced educators, Kent offers $9,235 above the state-funded salary base to reflect our additional duties for Time, Responsibility and Incentive, known in education circles as “TRI.” Teachers earn nearly double that in Everett, which paid $17,264 in TRI this past school year to its top veterans. Mukilteo paid $15,182. Bellevue, $14,899. Lake Washington, $14,806. The list keeps going. For veteran teachers, Kent ranks 17 out of 20 comparable districts (and that’s including our stipends).

At the bargaining table, Kent teachers have proposed boosting overall pay by about 6 percent, while at the same time reducing district accounting expenses for tracking individual time sheets for the various TRI activities as required under our previous contracts. The district’s curt response:

“If we indiscriminately cancel programs, then we could afford just about anything,” David Alfred, the district’s hired outside negotiator, told our bargaining team.

Idle threats to “indiscriminately” cancel programs are not productive in bargaining, and are not respectful of our teachers' commitment or professionalism. A district’s budget should thoughtfully reflect community values and carefully considered choices. Time, workload and compensation are real issues for our teachers, with real impacts on our students. Those issues impact the individual attention students receive, the size of their classes and the quality of their teachers. They are issues important enough for us to fight for, and for the district to seriously balance against other priorities, including new program adoptions, administrative overhead and reasonable but not excessive cash reserves. Our requests are affordable based on the district’s own financial projections, and have already been moderated to reflect the current economic climate. They deserve more than a flippant dismissal.

Salary Ranking
By District