South Dakota still isn’t meeting its target teacher salary. In 2016, we raised our state sales tax from 4% to 4.5% with the goal of raising average teacher salaries to a statewide average target, written into law, of $48,500. We’ve increased that target since, with the FY2019 target at $49,131.96. But we haven’t even hit the original target yet: according to the Department of Education, the average teacher salary statewide in FY2019 was $48,230, 1.8% below target.
Part of the “problem” is that schools have refused to follow the plan Governor Dennis Daugaard laid out when he pushed the sales-tax-for-teacher-pay plan through the Legislature in 2016. Daugaard predicated his salary calculations on his belief that South Dakota had too many teachers and that schools should cut 400 teachers. Instead, school districts as a whole have chosen to use the extra sales tax dollars in part to increase teaching FTEs by about 160. The 2019 average salary of $48,230 multiplied by the 9,601.56 teaching FTEs reported equals $463,083,238.80 spent on teacher salaries last year. If we had divvied that money up among the smaller teaching corps that Daugaard wanted, among 400 fewer teachers, last year’s average teacher salary would have been $50,326.60, which is just 0.07% shy of this year’s target salary of $50,360.26.
I notice these numbers in the context of Bob Mercer’s report on the School Finance Accountability Board’s meeting Wednesday, in which one vote saved the Sanborn Central School District from a $10,000 penalty for failing to give its 20 teachers the proper raises dictated by the formula. Governor Kristi Noem’s hard-nosed chief financial officer Liza Clark cast one of the two votes for whacking Sanborn Central… which leaves me wondering which way to spin: do we fry the Noem Administration for trying take $10,000 away from a rural school due to an honest mistake, or do we praise Clark and Noem for their dogged commitment to the rule of law and saying, as did Accountability Board member and Belle Fourche school business manager Susan Proefrock, that Sanborn Central and all of the other districts have had three years of training and practice, should know how to follow the law by now, and should be held accountable when they fail to follow the law.
The 2016 school funding formula only requires schools to meet certain expectations for increasing their teacher compensation, not to meet the statewide average target salary. If meeting the target average salary were the requirement, 132 school districts would be in trouble. Only seventeen school districts beat the statewide target salary:
| School District | Average Teacher Salary FY2019 | % above target ($49,131.96) | FTE FY2019 | Total spent on teacher salaries |
| Brandon Valley | $51,619 | 5.06% | 239.7 | $12,373,074 |
| Burke | $49,721 | 1.20% | 19.5 | $969,560 |
| Dakota Valley | $50,218 | 2.21% | 85.9 | $4,313,726 |
| Douglas | $55,869 | 13.71% | 182.74 | $10,209,501 |
| Dupree | $51,874 | 5.58% | 32.52 | $1,686,942 |
| Eagle Butte | $53,790 | 9.48% | 44.08 | $2,371,063 |
| Huron | $49,561 | 0.87% | 167.23 | $8,288,086 |
| Madison | $49,378 | 0.50% | 81.1 | $4,004,556 |
| McIntosh | $49,352 | 0.45% | 19.35 | $954,961 |
| Mitchell | $51,404 | 4.62% | 174.99 | $8,995,186 |
| Oglala Lakota | $55,563 | 13.09% | 94.9 | $5,272,929 |
| Rapid City | $51,775 | 5.38% | 852.88 | $44,157,862 |
| Sioux Falls | $52,185 | 6.21% | 1581.37 | $82,523,793 |
| Timber Lake | $50,177 | 2.13% | 33.86 | $1,698,993 |
| Wagner | $49,914 | 1.59% | 68.81 | $3,434,582 |
| Watertown | $51,197 | 4.20% | 242.4 | $12,410,153 |
| Yankton | $51,713 | 5.25% | 164.14 | $8,488,172 |
| statewide | $48,230 | 9601.56 | $463,083,239 |
Those seventeen districts employed 42.6% of South Dakota’s teachers and spent 45.8% of the $463 million spent statewide on teacher pay.
Rutland continues to pay the worst teacher salaries among South Dakota’s public schools, averaging only $36,403 last school year. Elk Mountain also failed to break $37K; Bowdle is the only other district not reaching $40K. Eleven school districts averaged less than $41K: Big Stone City, Woonsocket, Oldham-Ramona, Colman-Egan, Summit, Flandreau, Wilmot, Newell, Tripp-Delmont, Hoven, and Scotland.
Sad, very sad.
A teacher shortage and Daugard wanted them to cut teachers?! Typical SDGOP brilliance. 🙄🙄🙄
Elk Mountain is Edgemont Schools?
Elk Mountain is north fo Edgemont, but if I understand correctly, it remains separate from the Edgemont district.
Here is a tax revenue stream just begging to be tapped. Every billionaire around the world knows about it. Why don’t stoopid wingnut pols in South Dakota?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/the-great-american-tax-haven-why-the-super-rich-love-south-dakota-trust-laws
The opening rant at the breakfast meeting of the Conservatives with Common Sense will address teacher salaries and fatcat administrators.
grudznick, why so much disdain for “fatcat administrators” and so little disdain for the fatcat corporate CEOs?
Mr. o, we don’t have a law that says corporate CEOs have to pay their employees a certain amount and then hold them accountable to it. We let corporate CEOs sort out their own messes and work in the free market.
The teachers union failed.
We must change the fancy math calculations to take into account Maximum Administrator Salaries, and then punish the heck out of schools who are paying those grubbers more.
Grudz thinks administrators take too much of the education dollar, but he offers zero solutions. He and his cabal of kooks are goIng to rant about this topic, but that and 50 cents used to get you a Rapid City Journal. Don’t expect any wisdom to come out of that meeting.
In most communities, the school system is the biggest or one of the biggest employers, handling the most or nearly the most revenue in the community, the most or nearly the most real estate, the most or nearly the most square footage of buildings, maybe the biggest fleet of buses, and has responsibility for most of the kids in those communities. Doing all the things districts need to do requires specialized expertise. You can’t hire an assistant manager away from McDonald’s at bargain basement wages to do the job.
If you actually do the calculations Grudz wants and matched them with what the private sector would pay for the same training and expertise, we would be paying administrators 2-3 times what they are paid.
Yes, salaries for administrators are high. I admit I looked for ways to reduce administrative costs when I was on the school board. The problem is not many folks have the specialized training, expertise, ability and patience to do these jobs. Being a district superintendent is probably the hardest job in the state. Just the simple decision to close or not close school on snow days will get half the parents against you no matter what decision is made. A superintendent and many of the other administrators work much more than a 40 hour week, probably approaching 80 hours a lot of weeks. You have to pay someone pretty good to kill themselves with those hours.
Districts often end up combining duties and reducing administrators, rather than try to reduce salaries. If the district has good administrators, they want to keep them around for as along as they can, and that means negotiating good pay schedules.
My good Grudznick, you seem to have jumped the tracks again in your enemy creation rhetoric: a bipartisan and inclusive Blue Ribbon Task force wrote a proposal to better fund education (driven by teacher salaries); the GOP lead legislature passed that new formula (kicking and bucking); now the GOP super majority is not living up to that ambition — so you blame the teacher’s union?
As Donald points out, that is not where the money goes. I would say the real reason not all the money gets to teacher salaries is that schools provide So many more new student services that are not the three-R’s. A raft of physical, social, emotional services are not really under the umbrella of “teachers” or “administrators” but essential for the success of the student population we see now. I always liked Gov. Daugaard, but one blind spot he had was looking at today’s schools and thinking he was seeing schools from his long-ago experience as a student. Kids lost by the wayside are now included (mandated) into the fold of our schools; children whose disabilities would have excluded them from participation are now in schools being taught right along with EVERYONE else.
To me, the new funding formula is a bit like the ACA; a TREMENDOUS idea, a WORTHY goal, but something that would need constant monitoring and tweaking to really succeed over time. Just as the GOP has made the destruction of the ACA a legislative priority, to a lesser extent, the SD GOP has allowed the new funding formula, and the philosophy that drove it, to wither from inattention.
Excellent comment, O. Sums up the situation nicely.
The age of your local school’s teachers must be considered before judging that school’s progress toward making the target average salary. The more years of service your teachers have, the higher your school’s average salary will probably be. I’m thinking those 11 schools listed as not breaking $41,000 yet are the smaller schools that have retired most of the prior generation of teachers and are staffed with a lot of newbies, who are rotating quickly in and out because of low salaries, or not being able to cope with being a teacher, or dissatisfaction with the cultural opportunities of a small or isolated community. That turnover keeps the average salary lower than a school that has more teachers who have settled into the community.
I add my thank-you to O for your excellent review of factors the complainers like to ignore when discussing administrative salaries. May I add that if the complainers could review a public listing of the salaries of the managers of their local cooperatives, utilities, banks, retail chains, or manufacturers, they would see that school administrators are NOT paid as well as those who are doing similar duties in the private sector.