Area schools fight to compete with Wyoming teacher salaries

By Mary Garrigan, Journal staff | Thursday, March 01, 2007

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The Crook County School District always gives Spearfish superintendent Dave Peters a run for his money.

Peters competes for teachers with the Sundance, Wyo., school district, which is just 30 miles away from Spearfish and pays almost $8,000 more per year than Peters can offer a first-year teacher.

“It’s a real issue for us,” Peters said about his fellow Black Hills area superintendents. “At our first monthly meeting for Region 4, we counted 15 to 20 teachers and administrators who had moved west just this school year.”

The Spearfish district’s base teacher salary is $27,000, making it 50th in teacher pay among school districts in a state that ranks last in the nation for teacher salaries.

Crook County has a base teacher salary of $34,900, one of the lowest in Wyoming. Other Wyoming districts pay much better, including those in Cheyenne and Gillette, which have starting salaries of $40,000 or more. The oil-rich school district in Pinedale, Wyo., starts first-year teachers at $53,380.

Crook County’s base pay pales in comparison to Pinedale’s, but it is enough to keep Stephanie Grubb of Spearfish driving 70 miles every day to teach business classes at Sundance Secondary instead of in a high school closer to her home. As a teacher with five years of experience, Grubb would take at least a $5,000 pay cut, with less job security, to work in South Dakota, she said.

“There have been job openings in Belle Fourche and Newell, but I decided I couldn’t afford to apply for them,” Grubb said. “And staffing cuts in some of the school districts around here concern me at least as much as the lower pay does.”

Hulett School principal Barb Ice spent 14 years as a classroom teacher and reading instructor for the Rapid City school district before leaving to take a first-year principal’s job with the Crook County district last July. She spends the school week in a Hulett apartment and returns to her home and husband in Rapid City on the weekends. At least 10 other teachers and educators in the Crook County district retain their residence in South Dakota and commute to jobs in Wyoming daily.

The Spearfish school district was able to fill all of its teaching positions this year, but Peters said that task is increasingly difficult.

“Is the pool smaller? Yes, it is. Has it become more difficult? Absolutely,” he said.

The days of drawing 75 to 100 applicants for every elementary-school teaching position are long gone, Peters said. “Now, you get maybe 15 or 20 applicants for those same positions, and every high school position is difficult,” he said.

Filling job openings in mathematics, science and special education is even tougher, he said. “For many of those positions, you’re lucky to have two or three applicants, and you have to work really hard to get those,” Peters said.

Qualified graduates in those fields are “snapped up” as quickly as colleges produce them, according to Nancy Hall, dean of the College of Education at Black Hills State University in Spearfish.

Teacher shortages nationwide in math, music, science, foreign language and special education make it especially hard for South Dakota districts to fill those jobs. “Every one of our special-education graduates had a job offer before they walked across the stage,” Hall said. “Local schools are not just competing with each other for those graduates; they’re competing with a national market.”

At the Black Hills Teacher Fair in April, recruiters from as many as 60 school districts in 14 states will come to campus bearing signing bonuses and housing offers to entice new graduates to their programs. All of them pay better than South Dakota does.

Steve Hengen, human-

resources director for Rapid City Area Schools, said declining applicant pools in South Dakota are a result of low starting salaries and fewer specialized graduates. Rapid City was able to fill all of its teaching positions for 2006-07 before school began but not until the last moment. On Aug. 18, the district still had 14 openings. “It’s getting tighter every year,” he said. “Nine years ago when I started in this position, we had all kinds of applicants. We just had to pick the best of the bunch. Now, we’re advertising more, and we’re making connections and looking in all sorts of places we never used to.”

New teacher recruitment is especially difficult, Hengen said, given the district’s base salary of $27,044. The district recently began offering signing bonuses paid over three years for certain positions. Rapid City has better luck recruiting veteran teachers because of recent changes to the steps system on its pay scale, he said. “That’s helping us recruit more experienced teachers.”

Ice, a veteran teacher, made a career change for reasons that had more to do with professional advancement and job satisfaction than a bigger paycheck, she said. But she understands why new teachers would be attracted to a Wyoming district.

“It all comes down to economics,” she said. “If you’re just out of college with school loans to pay, that difference is significant.”

Ice wants the South Dakota Legislature to address teacher pay by passing SB157, a bill that would deliver an extra $7.2 million in permanent, ongoing education funding to school districts. Much of that new money would go to fund higher teacher salaries.

The bill passed the Senate and is awaiting action by the House, which has passed another education funding bill. A conference committee is expected to create compromise legislation on teacher compensation assistance for school districts.

“I think it would definitely help keep quality teachers in South Dakota,” Ice said.

So does a long list of South Dakota business interests, including the Rapid City Area Chamber of Commerce, all of which offered their support for the legislation earlier this week before the House State Affairs Committee. Avera-McKennan, Sanford Health, Citibank, Raven Industries, CorTrust Bank, Western Surety, Ramkota and numerous other businesses urged the Legislature to invest in teacher salaries as a way to invest in economic development in the state.

Contact Mary Garrigan at 394-8410 or mary.garrigan@rapidcityjournal.com