When Covington Independent Public Schools approved a 4% salary increase for teachers in April, district Superintendent Alvin Garrison sent an email to district staff informing them of the raise and thanking them for their hard work.
“We remain committed to providing a competitive salary as we understand the inflationary pressure being exerted on staff,” Garrison said in the email. “We most certainly thank you for your dedication to our students and families.”
Upon receiving the email, former Holmes High School English teacher Greg Harris felt compelled to share his thoughts.
In an email reply to the superintendent, Harris wrote, “Your advocacy and efforts on behalf of teachers are very much appreciated. That said, these are not salary ‘increases’ in the real world.”
“I thought it was just a bit tone-deaf,” Harris told LINK nky in May.
Harris has a doctorate in English and worked last year as an English teacher in Holmes High School’s English Language Learner, or ELL, program, which specializes in teaching English to students who are learning English as a foreign language. Before coming to Holmes, he worked in the nonprofit sector and public policy, advising organizations on educational policy for over a decade.
In his original email to staff, Garrison said that the 4% salary increase was coupled with a normal step increase — an additional 1.9% given to most employees.
“In total,” Garrison said in the email, “this has resulted in an approximately 13% combined increase for the 2022-23 and 2023-24 schools for nearly all employees.”
Garrison went on to say that the schools want teachers and staff to know they are valued, as is the work that they do.
Still, after working in Covington Schools for only a year, Harris decided “with a heavy heart,” to leave the district. Next year, he’ll be taking up a position as an English teacher in a district in Ohio.
By his assessment, the district simply isn’t doing enough to provide for the needs of both teachers and students, especially for the students in the ELL program.
Compensation is only the beginning.
“Thank you for the raises,” Harris said rhetorically, “but… in terms of reality and living expenses, they’re not really raises. And we’re still, when it comes to compensation, nowhere a match for what other professionals in our community make.”
In his email to the superintendent, Harris furnished statistics from the U.S. Consumer Price Index, showing recent U.S. inflation rates to buttress his argument.
Although inflation rates have declined in recent months, the district’s salary schedule still makes it hard to live well, Harris said.
“According to the salary schedule, it would really take about a decade to reach just median income levels in our own backyard,” Harris said.
Covington schools determine teacher salaries based on years of experience both in and out of the district. An entry-level teacher with no experience earns about $44,000 their first year working in the district, according to the district’s most recently published salary schedule. The median salary for teachers across all experience levels in Kentucky is about $48,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In other words, Harris’ estimations are slightly off, and the salary appropriations for teachers in the district approach state trends; but his point that new teachers tend to make much less income than the median for bachelor’s degree-holding professionals in Covington is correct.
In 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau put the median income for Covington professionals with bachelor’s degrees at about $52,000. In addition, the cost of living in Covington is about 1.3% higher than the rest of Northern Kentucky, according to local economic development company beNKY.
“That’s not much of an enticement during a teaching shortage,” Harris wrote in his email.
To address this, Harris recommended to the superintendent that the district index teacher salaries to area income levels.
On top of that, Harris said, the administrative staff, who often command six-figure salaries, have not provided any localized, in-school leadership for the ELL program.
“There is literally no dedicated school-based leadership,” Harris said.
Instead, Harris said, there are thinly stretched district-based administrators responsible for large numbers of students and teachers who, by virtue of their centralization, are inevitably incapable of adequately supporting teachers day to day.
“When you get to a point where 35% of your student population is immigrants, mostly from Guatemala,” Harris said, the lack of experienced, easily accessible mentorship can leave ELL teachers feeling left out in the wind.
LINK nky could not corroborate the percentages Harris furnished, but the number of students in the English Language program has been steadily increasing since 2007, according to the district’s own data. In addition to Guatemala, the district also has students from Haiti, Congo, Mexico, Syria and Colombia among others, all of whom speak different languages.
“So what you have then is sort of a two-tiered system where your English language learners and English language instructors were sort of second class citizens within the school district,” Harris said.
To that end, Harris advocated the cultivation of “lead teachers” who would serve as on-site staff mentors and leaders in exchange for a salary bump of $3,000 to $5,000.
“There direly needs to be a model where teachers can get peer support, where teachers help develop fellow teachers, where their salaries are supplemented,” Harris added.
Moreover, he didn’t put much stock in the idea that the district couldn’t afford to improve teacher salaries.
“You can’t hide behind the excuse of cost constraints,” Harris said. “You’re spending money, you’re just not spending it on that segment of your student population. I don’t have deep insights on the budget, but I’m sure, instead of having four vice principals and having all these director-level positions at the district, you can actually empower school-based governance. It’s not even a matter of creating new positions.”
The issue of teacher retention has been on the board of education’s radar for some time, although Kentucky law prevents school boards from getting directly involved in personnel matters.
“This is a decades-long problem that we’ve had in Covington when it relates to teacher turnover,” Board of Education President Tom Haggard said.
“When I talk to teachers, it’s a variety of reasons,” Haggard said. “But they’re leaving mainly, at least what I’m hearing, it’s an unsustainable workload. It’s just a really difficult work-life balance.”
Board Member Hannah Edelen, who previously worked as a teacher in the district but ran for the board after her teaching contract wasn’t renewed (amid some controversy) has also raised issues of teacher retention in board meetings. She said that many of the complaints she’d heard from teachers in the district were “consistent with national trends.”
“Things to do with working conditions, pay, the changes to student behavior post pandemic, work-life balance,” Edelen said.
She cited the Kentucky Department of Education’s Working Conditions Survey, administered to school employees across the state every other year. It shows that while Covington Independent Schools has improved in some areas since 2021, it’s declined in others, specifically in measures for the general education of the students and in school climate.
Haggard hoped the district’s new strategic plan could help address some of the issues.
“So in the final version of it, there will be quite a bit of strategies and tactics in there trying to address staff retention and recruitment,” Haggard said. “From the board level, we just have to continue to push the administration to say, we’ve got a culture problem here. How do we fix this?
“We can’t keep losing teachers at the rate we’re losing them,” he added. “We’re never going to give kids the education that they deserve if we’re not able to keep high quality veteran teachers in their classrooms.”
For his part, Harris knows that a smaller district like Covington Independent may never be able to compete with school districts across the river in terms of pay.
“If you can’t compete with some neighboring districts, especially on the Ohio side, with salaries, you can compete with culture and making this a nice place to work,” Harris said.
He’s already begun the process of transferring his license over to Ohio. In spite of his criticisms, he doesn’t like the fact that he’s leaving.
“I would stay,” he said, “because I care about my students and I like what I’m teaching, but I have no faith that the district is anywhere equipped to address today’s student population and is doing anything to right the ship in terms of having more effective classrooms and better impact.”
The district’s English Language Learner program administrators declined to comment.