Emails, Michael Houser, chief human capital officer, Austin Independent School District, May 20-21 and May 26, 2015
7:11 p.m.
May 20, 2015
We did not compare our salaries to all 1000+ school districts in the state. We chose, what we consider to be similar urban districts, as our competition when recruiting teachers. We also did not compare ourselves to every nearby district, with nearby being problematic. We considered the school districts selected in our analysis as our most immediate competition.
9:37 a.m.
May 21, 2015
Like most districts, we pay the cost of our standard health insurance coverage for individual employees. The budgeted cost of this benefit is $446.25 per employee per month. Our employees have the option to buy up to a more comprehensive health insurance policy and to add spouse/family members at the expense of the employee.
I am attaching the information I shared with the Board in January regarding local peer districts and urban peer districts in terms of Health Benefits Contribution Comparison.
I trust you will find this data helpful.
Michael
From: Selby, Gardner
Sent: Thursday, May 21, 2015 10:29 AM
To: Michael Houser
Subject: RE: Insurance
So how does counting the health coverage change how the district ranks in salary/benefits?
11:23 a.m.
Most all districts pay the cost of employee health insurance in full for the employee. Therefore, I do not think that the cost of providing health insurance to our employees necessarily changes our rankings. Locally we spend $86.36 more per month per employee than the average, and in comparison to urban we spend $108.12 more per employee per month than the average. However, the benefits and co-payments in district health insurance plans vary greatly as well as the cost to the employee to buy insurance for their spouse/family. TRS offers employee health insurance coverage to districts currently at a rate of $325 per month per employee. The downside is that the benefits are not as good as ours at this time. Changing our current health insurance provider to TRS for example would conceivably return $121.25 per employee per month, however, employees would see reductions in benefits that have financial implications for them, and once a district decides to join TRS occurs, just like Social Security, the decision is permanent.
12:51 p.m.
May 26, 2015
To clarify my statement in our last discussion, we have some 4167 teachers with Bachelor Degrees and some 1675 teachers with Master/Doctorate Degrees. Teachers with Master/Doctorate Degrees earn $862 more annually. I had stated $600 more on the average, but the exact answer is $862.
The study that I presented to the Board in January compared only the Bachelor Degree schedules from our competitive school districts. Given that our stipend of $862 for Master/Doctorate Degree is at best comparable, and in most cases less than our competitive districts, the outcome for ranking salary schedules for both the Bachelor Degree and the Master/Doctorate Degree is virtually the same. I can certainly include both studies for the Board in the future, but the results will be redundant.
As we have discussed, perhaps the best comparative analysis of AISD salaries is to compare the average salary earned by teachers in our competitive districts. Using TEA data or TASB data, in the final analysis when Social Security is removed from a teacher's actual pay, the only district that pays its teachers less locally is Hays. There are no districts in the urban competitive market paying less than AISD, either with or without Social Security.
I trust this information is helpful.
Thanks,
Michael