Article by Annie Hays
Salida School Mill Levy Election – November 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
IN MOST PARTS OF THE COUNTRY, voters aren’t nearly as eager to head to the polls this year as they were last year. But in Salida the school board is campaigning to insure that citizens of District R-32-J will be anything but apathetic on voting day 2001. The Salida School Board is asking its voters for a second time in a row to approve a mill levy override for its schools.
Last year a similar mill levy override proposal failed 53.7% to 46.3%. But this is not an uncommon scenario in Central Colorado. When school boards in the area ask their communities for money, the election typically ends with very close margins. In 1996 the Buena Vista School District passed a 7.7 million dollar bond issue, but just barely. It passed by only 18 votes. In 1994 both the South Park School District and the Moffat School District passed bond issues, South Park’s passed with two thirds of the vote, but Moffat’s victory could be counted on one hand.
In Salida’s case, between the years of 1994 and 1998, the school board mysteriously worked itself into a debt of about one million dollars. “When the community was presented with that information, they were shocked,” said Salida School District Superintendent, Jim Wilson. (Wilson took the job after that debt was accumulated).
Then, last year the school board asked its community for an override of 5 mills (about $475,295); two-thirds of the override funds were slated to go to salary increases and one-third would go to boost educational programs.
But before handing more money to the district, Salida voters wanted to know what had happened to the million or so dollars the district had overspent.
At an informational meeting preceding voting day last year, Wilson explained that the money had been spent on programs — when cutbacks should have been made instead. According to the district’s audits, as the state’s funding dropped, the Salida school board simply compensated with money it had in reserve, and soon the district found itself in debt. When asked exactly what the money went towards, Wilson explained that it was spent on education — nothing out of the ordinary.
The voters, however, didn’t agree to last year’s mill levy override proposal.
So this year the Salida School Board is at it again, asking the voters to approve a new mill levy override proposal. Although cutbacks have been made in the past three years to compensate for overspending, the school district feels that it is having a hard time paying staff salaries that are competitive to wages in Buena Vista and other nearby school districts. According to Jim Wilson, the money generated from cutting teachers and administrators, aides, and programs such as art classes at the elementary level has been used to lessen the district’s debt and build back its reserve fund, but not to increase teacher pay.
“We would be asking for this override for salaries whether the money had been lost or not,” said Wilson.
But the proposal this year looks a little different.
Kent Maxwell, a vocal opponent of last year’s proposal — and an experienced election official for the Salida Fire Department — believes he aided in the downfall of the 2000 school board override request.
“Some people are automatically going to vote yes on school tax bills, and others no. The rest look at the facts and figures and base their decision on those, and that’s what I encourage people to do.
“There’s no doubt that the Salida District needs money to compete for teachers in a tangible way, but there has to be accountability. If the tax bill isn’t written in a specific way so that the voters know exactly what their money will be going towards, the informed voter will most likely vote no. It’s a big trust issue,” Maxwell said.
Last year Maxwell did not agree with how the bill was worded and suggested several additions, especially a sunset clause, a measure written into the bill that would force a re-approval of the override in four to six years if it passed. The board did not include such a measure last year, and although it was a narrow loss, the override failed with an outcome of 2,209 NO votes to 1,904 YES votes.
THIS YEAR THE BOARD is including a six-year sunset clause, and Maxwell believes that the sunset clause makes the measure more flexible, and therefore more palatable to voters.
At least one other voter agrees with Maxwell. “I’m willing to vote it in for six years and see how it goes, but I have a problem with forever and ever,” said Mary Holmes, the Postmaster of Poncha Springs. Holmes ran for a school board position several years ago.
The sunset clause makes it possible for voters who are skeptical about the district’s previous overspending to support a more limited increase in funds. According to supporters of the sunset clause, if it becomes obvious that the district still needs the override funds in four years or so, the school board can start informing the voters about the district’s needs and the reason behind them long before the six years are over.
In the meantime, however, some voters believe that a mill levy increase may no longer be necessary in six years due to Amendment 23 — which should provide more state funds for Colorado school districts.
Thus, the sunset clause allows both the board and the voters to reevaluate the district’s situation in the foreseeable future, and that makes this year’s mill levy override less of a commitment than last year’s.
But is this increase in funds for the Salida School District really needed in the first place?
The school board would have the community believe so. It claims that employee wages in Salida are very low compared to neighboring school districts, and that Salida schools are losing potential employees due to low wages.
The numbers, however, don’t necessarily support this argument. On the other hand, the numbers don’t necessarily refute the argument, either. Unfortunately, the available numbers don’t make a clear case for or against a mill levy override.
Bury yourself in school numbers for a month, and you’ll find that the available numbers aren’t always helpful. In some cases that’s due to simple errors. At one point, I found a set of numbers that seemed downright fabricated, but as it turned out they were legitimate (and easily verified) numbers from 1999, rather than from 2000 as they were purported to be.
Other material, however, can be presented in a myriad of ways. Salaries can be given in yearly totals or divided by the hour, the month, the school year, or the entire year; salaries may or may not include benefit packages; and there may be expenses required of employees which reduce take-home wages.
Some district employees, for example, seemed more worried about how much their family insurance plans cost than about their actual salaries. Also, teachers inevitably have to buy more supplies out of their own pockets when budgets are tight, and in recent years Salida’s budget has been rigorously streamlined due to past overspending.
THIS TIME AROUND, the mill levy override is supposed to be for employee salaries (and benefits) only; override funds will not be spent on new teachers or on school programs. This time around arguments for and against the override proposal rely heavily on dollar amounts. But there are a lot of numbers that don’t match — and a lot of different ways to look at the numbers that do match.
The Colorado Department of Education (CDE) recently posted a report card for every elementary, junior high, and high school in the state, and they’re available to anyone via the web. School grades are based on student performance, a school history, the CSAP test, and the school’s safety and environment statistics.
Each school’s report card also lists a taxpayer’s report that breaks down the sources of the district’s revenue and how the district uses those funds. There’s also information about the school, the district, and school district staff which includes data on the number of teachers and administrators, student-teacher ratios, the number of teachers who left the district in the preceding year, and the average teacher and administrator salaries.
Comparing the 2000-2001 report cards of Salida’s schools with nine other school districts in Central Colorado, Salida schools stack up pretty well. The other nine districts we’ve taken into account are Buena Vista, Cotopaxi, Custer County Consolidated, Florence, Gunnison Watershed, Lake County, Moffat, Mountain Valley, and South Park.
The CDE rated each school on a 5 point overall academic performance scale of excellent, high, average, low, and unsatisfactory. Salida High School received an overall academic performance of high from the CDE. So did Buena Vista High School and Gunnison High School.
Cotopaxi Junior-Senior High School, Custer County Undivided High School in Westcliffe, Mountain Valley Senior High School in Saguache, and South Park High School in Fairplay all received average ratings. Florence High School, Lake County High School in Leadville, and Moffat High School received low ratings.
Salida’s elementary school received an average rating, and it’s middle school received a high rating for the 7th and 8th grades, and an average rating for the 5th and 6th grades.
The CDE reports that Salida teachers made an average of $34,507 in 2000-2001, whereas the average teacher salary for the ten districts was $31,274.
BUT THE NUMBERS that really stand out on Salida’s report card are the percentage of district funds that go towards paying teacher salaries, and the percentage of school days Salida teachers miss.
Salida’s report card shows that the school district spends 55.3% percent of its funds on teacher salaries, whereas the ten district average is 40.9%. Other districts with high percentages spent on teachers are Gunnison and Florence. Gunnison is reported to spend 56.2% with an average teacher salary of $31,980, and Florence spends 55.1% of its funds on its teachers with an average teacher salary of $37,400.
According to the CDE’s report card, Salida teachers missed 9.3% of teaching days last year. But the average number of days missed for the ten districts overall was 4.4%. According to these numbers, it looks like the Salida School District is spending a large portion of its budget to pay teachers to miss a lot of school. And at the same time the board is asking its community for a tax increase to pay Salida teachers even more.
But just how accurate are the CDE report cards?
On September 25th, The Denver Post published an article with the headline “Report card errors stun schools.” Although the article concentrated mainly on some of the state’s bigger districts in the Denver area, Wilson feels that Salida was also misrepresented on its report cards.
“The CDE never checked back with the districts to verify numbers,” Wilson said. “We’ve encouraged those who have questions about the numbers to call the district for clarification.”
On the other hand, despite numerous errors, most of the CDE report card numbers are right. Whenever it was possible, we checked them against the State of Colorado’s annual report made by the Division of Property Taxation, and against numbers released by the R-32-J school district, and for the most part the CDE numbers were accurate — even though there were noticeable exceptions. We, however, had no way (and not nearly enough staff) to check most of the numbers.
So what would it mean if the numbers regarding teacher absences in Salida versus absences elsewhere are accurate? Why would Salida’s teachers be absent more often than others?
Unfortunately, the CDE report cards do not give explanations for their numbers, and that’s another drawback of trying to evaluate our schools by the numbers; the numbers don’t necessarily reveal much about the circumstances that created them.
According to an informational pamphlet released by the Salida School Board, last year Buena Vista’s school mill levy was 37.368 mills compared to Salida’s 28.076. And that would seem to jibe with the CDE report card figures that say Salida’s 2000 district revenue per pupil is $6,128 whereas Buena Vista’s district revenue is $7,381 per pupil.
But the CDE report cards also say the average teacher pay in Salida is higher than the average teacher pay in Buena Vista — and that is consistent with the CDE’s statement that Salida spends more of its budget on teachers.
CURIOUSLY, although these numbers might seem to refute the district’s assertions, the CDE report cards are also consistent with the numbers Wilson released regarding Salida’s lower pay scale. According to Wilson’s report:
First year teachers in Salida make $23,000, whereas first year teachers in Buena Vista make $24,500. A thirty year teacher with a Master’s Degree in Salida would make $38,875 whereas a teacher with the same credentials in Buena Vista would make $45,500. Twenty-first year superintendents in Buena Vista would make $83,950 and in Salida the same position would pay $68,750.
Also according to Wilson’s report, such pay scale discrepancies exist with very few exceptions across the board. Therefore, Salida’s proposed mill levy override amount (of $664,635) was determined by allowing for a 12.8 percent increase in the budgeted salaries for all employees in District R-32-J — 12.8 percent is the amount that Buena Vista’s wage scale exceeded Salida’s. (That percentage was determined by calculating how much more District R-32-J’s actual employees would have made if they were paid according to Buena Vista’s wage scale.)
And that sounds fine — except according to the CDE report cards, Buena Vista doesn’t actually pay its teachers more than Salida teachers; it pays them less. Overall, the average teacher salary for District R-32-J in 2000-2001 was $34,507 according to the CDE — which made it the second highest paying district in our ten-district survey. The average teacher pay for Buena Vista R-31 was $31,975.
On the other hand, the CDE numbers are somewhat unreliable, so they may be wrong. But even if you assume that these particular CDE numbers are right, any conclusions you might make are still debatable.
If, for example, the CDE report cards are accurate about Salida’s above-average teachers’ salaries, that fact could be explained by the large number of teachers in the district with tenure. Salida’s CDE report card shows that 61 out of 68 teachers in the district had tenure in 2000 whereas 44 of Buena Vista’s 70 teachers had tenure. Thus, Salida’s higher pay might be explained by the 11.2% teacher-cut the district says it has made since 1998 — because presumably the teachers cut were those with less experience and therefore the ones lowest on the pay scale.
Also, if those CDE figures are accurate and Salida actually has fewer teachers than Buena Vista — even though Salida has more students — then instead of denying a mill levy override because our teachers are paid well enough, perhaps the citizens of R-32-J should approve a mill levy increase to employ more teachers. (Except this particular mill levy is said to be for teacher raises, not for new teachers.)
For its size, the Salida district seemed to have a pretty lean teaching staff so we thought that maybe the CDE had underestimated the number of teachers in Salida. Therefore we asked the district how many teachers were employed in 2000-2001, and the school district readily supplied a list of staff positions for that year that we could count in order to check the CDE staff numbers. But in the final assessment — although the CDE numbers seemed reasonably close to accurate — we weren’t sure how to count all of them because the CDE listed teachers, paraprofessionals (which includes counselors), administrators, “other” professionals, and school support staff, whereas the school listed among other things: teacher; title one; special ed; Careers; coach; computer; and half-time positions.
THOUGH OUR TEACHER COUNT would indicate that the CDE numbers and the District’s numbers are close — being nearly identical in the High School and Middle School but usually coming up anywhere from several teachers short to five extra teachers in the Elementary school — we weren’t at all sure we were counting the same positions.
In the end, it was impossible to tell exactly how accurate the CDE numbers were, but it was amply clear that if the Colorado Department of Education and the school districts in Colorado want to achieve any kind of useful evaluation, they will have to agree to use the same terms, divisions, and accounting system on a regular basis.
The CDE also had an annoying habit of counting fractional positions, then rounding off the fractions. Why they might count some positions in fractions was fairly clear. For R-32-J they listed administrators – 5; then the CDE listed one administrator for Longfellow and the Middle School and 1.1 administrators for the High School (perhaps reflecting that the combination Athletics, Maintenance, Facilities Director performs more duties for the high school than for the other schools or the district). And that actually seemed somewhat reasonable, but it was odd that 23.1 teachers at the high school, plus 23.7 at the elementary school, and 21.7 for the middle school got rounded off as 68 teachers.
Whether that bothers you or not, however, it would seem that the CDE report cards make Salida schools — especially regarding teacher pay — look better than the picture Wilson and the school board have been depicting.
But do they?
Not really. Although Salida may spend more on teachers than Buena Vista, according to the CDE report cards the average teacher pay in the state of Colorado is $40,887 — which is notably higher than salaries in either Buena Vista or Salida (or any of our region’s other school districts for that matter).
Then again, maybe all of these numbers are wrong. Or maybe they’re absolutely 100% right.
Either way, they will change from year to year as senior teachers retire and novice teachers get hired, as administrators move on, and staff members go back to college for advanced degrees, as old textbooks get replaced with new, and outdated equipment has to be repaired or upgraded, when a district gets hit with a particularly nasty strain of flu or a record-breaking snow damages school roofs.
All in all, it looks like R-32-J could use the money. But then again, it looks like all of our rural school districts could use the money. And since there are no reliable crystal balls it’s uncertain exactly how much money District R-32-J will need.
THE PRIMARY CAMPAIGN ISSUE behind this election is that Salida R-32-J doesn’t have enough money to attract new teachers. But if, as the Salida school board fears, many teachers do leave or retire in the next few years, the district may not need as much money as it now pays out in teacher’s salaries because it’s unlikely that retiring teachers will be replaced with tenured 30-year teachers at the top of the wage scale.
On the other hand, though, R-32-J fears it won’t be able to attract any new teachers without adopting a higher wage scale. So what’s a voter to do?
In the end, the numbers don’t make a great case for or against this latest mill levy override proposal. In fact, none of this seems too clear, and it appears as if no one can agree with each other or with the Colorado Department of Education on what’s what. For Joe Salidan, the Informed Taxpayer, it’s easy to look at the figures, and still be confused. So what’s Joe to think?
Mistrust of the school board is one of the easiest places to turn, and a common one — at least in Salida.
School boards can all too often take on a Wizard of Oz characteristic, appearing all powerful and unapproachable to the general public — when in reality behind the curtain lies a panel of elected community members who are typically anything but sly, professional politicians.
Mary Holmes has had a lot of experience with the Salida School Board, including running for a position on it a few years ago, and she has plenty to say about it. “It’s not that I think they’re devious or going to do anything wrong, but it takes tons and tons of time to be on the school board, and sometimes it’s easy to let things slide, and let someone else do the talking.
“There’s a tendency to rely on the superintendent to tell them everything. I don’t want to point a finger or put the blame on anyone, but they have to be more responsive to voters.”
Of course superintendents typically blame tight school tax election margins on other things. Buena Vista Superintendent Dennis Giese doesn’t think the close margin in school tax votes has to do with trust. “We have a very strong supportive group of people that crosses all lines and generations, but it’s countered by another group that typically has a low income or doesn’t look at education as a priority,” Giese commented.
Cotopaxi superintendent, Larry Coleman believes that people are just tired of paying taxes. “This is the only venue in the world where you can choose whether or not to be taxed, and a lot of people vote no simply because they can.”
Ken Brandon, Salida School Board member, thinks that voters shouldn’t have to worry about school money issues as much as they do. “It’s a problem on the state level with priorities. The state gives roads and prisons more attention than it does to education.”
But all of these people are directing attention away from District R-32-J and the mill levy override proposal.
IN THE END, this whole thing boils down to whether you think teachers should be paid more, and it probably doesn’t really matter whether teachers are making a few thousand dollars more or less in Salida than they are in Buena Vista or Cotopaxi — if those amounts aren’t enough.
In district R-32-J, the salary scale provides $23,000 for starting teachers, and in the mid to high 30s for the most experienced teachers. Administrators typically make anywhere from $35,000 to $68,750 depending on their position and seniority, and service personnel (custodians, cooks, bus drivers, aides, etc.) are paid from $6.38 to 14.21 per hour.
Also important is whether the voter trusts the district’s administrators and the school board to use the money well. The old cliché holds true here: trust is easy to lose and hard to regain. When it comes to finances, the Salida School Board has done what it can to rectify its past financial mistakes, but skepticism about the district’s spending lingers.
Exactly how desperately Salida’s schools need money is open to debate. But there is one thing that the CDE and District R-32-J agree on; Salida’s schools are better than average.
November 6th is just around the corner, and on that day the Salida School Board will know if it has gained enough trust in the eyes of the voters to be given a second chance — for six years at least.
Annie Hays, a graduate of public schools in Seattle, is a senior English major at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. She interned full-time at this magazine in September, and will continue to contribute throughout the school year. In editing, we removed some technical information about overrides because it could be handled better separately, and substituted by adding more data from CDE and school-district sources. Although Hays approved of all changes, we mention them in case of future questions.
