Brown County Schools now has over $5 million in grant funding to pay teachers more for helping students in all grades reach higher levels of success.
It was announced early last week in Indianapolis that the district was the recipient of a $5.5 million federal grant aimed at supporting and investing in all of the district’s teachers working to help students reach benchmarks.
The money is a portion of a $47 million grant from the federal Teacher and School Leader Incentive program that will be split between BCS, Perry Township School and Goshen Community Schools.
“Brown County Schools are honored, humbled and quite frankly just ridiculously excited about this opportunity and are still pinching ourselves that what was once a dream for our small and rural school community is now a reality. A reality for which we are affirmed by hope in great things to come,” Superintendent Laura Hammack said.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]The National Institute for Excellence in Teaching was awarded the five-year grant to “expand and sustain work to support teachers and improve students’ academic success” in the three school districts, according to a press release from NIET.
“As a small and rural school district, this grant will add significant value to the experience of teaching and learning,” Hammack said in the NIET press release.
The grant dollars will be used in 32 schools serving 25,000 students, 1,500 teachers and 80 school leaders throughout the three districts, a media advisory from NIET states.
Specific spending
The grant dollars have a specific purpose and can only be used to to implement the TAP System for Teacher and Student Advancement for all certified staff.
The TAP System for Teacher and Student Advancement has four components. The first component is multiple career paths, which will provide additional compensation to teachers for taking on leadership roles.
This means that as teachers pursue positions through their careers depending on their skills and interests, like mentoring others, and move up the ranks so can their pay, according to the NIET website.
The second component is outgoing applied professional growth, which provides resources for professional development.
The TAP professional development model provides teacher with professional “ongoing, job-embedded, collaborative, student-centered” learning that is led by “expert instructors,” according to the website.
The school day will be restructured by TAP to provide time for this development and weekly sessions will be focused on “individual needs of teachers and students, determined by data and student work,” the NIET website states.
Instructional focused accountability is the third component and uses the TAP rubric for teacher evaluations. This new rubric will give teachers feedback that “honors and rewards them for how well they teach their students.”
Teachers will receive bonuses for hitting different marks throughout the school year with the goal of moving students forward, which is something the district has not been able to do before, Hammack said.
TAP will also provide ongoing training, mentoring and classroom support during the school day to help teachers meet these standards. Hammack said the grant money will be used to pay for the professional development and the substitute teachers who will cover the classes for teachers while they are in training.
Finally, teachers will earn additional compensation for taking on new roles and responsibilities on top of their base salary using the grant dollars. The grant money will be used to pay for at least one teacher leader in each school along with stipends for educators, assistant principals and principals to serve on leadership teams in each building.
The leadership team stipends are to “honor the outside of school work time that those individuals will be putting into their leadership team capacities,” Hammack added.
Those teachers who take on teacher leader roles will receive a full salary to be paid for by the grant dollars.
“That’ll be a great help to our education fund because the salaries of some of the teachers that are currently being paid for by our education fund will get picked up by the grant,” Hammack said.
The education fund pays the salaries of teachers and staff.
Grant money will also be used to pay substitutes to cover classes while teachers and the leadership teams attend the TAP National Conferences over the next five years.
Hammack said using the grant dollars to fund a system that will reward the district’s “talented teachers and leaders” will put the district in a better position to attract and retain “high-quality educators while simultaneously increasing student achievement.”
“We know that the single greatest impact on student achievement is a high-quality educator. These grant resources ensure a systemic process for teacher leadership and professional practice,” she said.
This school year will serve a a “planning and preparation year” before a full deployment of the TAP System for Teacher and Student Advancement next school year. NIET has set up bi-weekly phone calls with the district as they begin work on deploying this model.
“They will help us from every aspect from the nuts and bolts business side of things to really how this is going to roll out so we can ultimately impact student achievement,” Hammack said.
The Regional Opportunities Initiative Inc. allowed the district to initially engage with NIET using their Ready Schools grant dollars. Brown County Schools was named a Ready School by ROI almost two years ago. Last year, the district received a $500,000 Ready Schools grant from ROI.
Using some of that money, district leaders had been working with NIET on developing a professional development model for the district and a system to deliver it.
“We’ve been in such a mode of reducing our budget, we didn’t have the dollars to be able to engage with NIET. It’s an expensive connection because of the quality of the development you receive,” Hammack said.
This engagement ultimately led to the district receiving a portion of the grant funding that NIET was awarded.
What about the referendum?
In 2016, Brown County voters approved the school district’s referendum that added 8 cents per $100 of assessed value to the property tax rate for seven years.
The new money to be raised was to total about $1 million a year for seven years. The Brown County Career Resource Center gets one cent of the 8-cent tax, at about $125,000 a year.
The bulk — about $875,000 — has been used to help pay teachers in light of declining student enrollment. The number of students enrolled in the district is tied directly to the state funding the district receives each year in its education fund, which is used to pay those salaries.
NIET intends for the grant dollars to be used for performance compensation in addition to the district’s traditional salary schedule, which relies on referendum funding.
“They (NIET) really kind of take a business model like business executives get a bonus at the end of their year for hitting their goals or hitting their marks. Much like that model, educators who are professionals are awarded much like those in business,” Hammack said.
Because of this the teacher salary schedule will not change and the district will need referendum funding in the future.
Until 2017, Brown County teachers had been stuck on their current salary step. The 2017 contract was the first time teachers were able to move up in salary levels based on their effectiveness rating and years of experience since 2011. The district had given them stipends and base salary increases, but teachers were not moved to different levels of pay.
The district is in negotiations now for next year’s contract.
“While we’ll be building for sustainability of this (TAP) model after this grant has expired, we won’t necessarily have these grant resources for five years down the way. Really as we continue to look for the future, our district intends to have a very similar funding structure that we have currently in place,” Hammack said.
This means referendum funding will be a factor in determining future salary schedules for educators. The referendum is up in 2023.
‘A monumental moment’
When teachers accept the teacher leader positions and their salaries are then paid using grant dollars, the decision will have to be made to either hire another teacher to replace them and pay them out of the education fund or eliminate the positions through an attrition model as district needs are restructured, Hammack said.
It’s impossible right now to say what impact moving teacher leader salaries out of the education fund will have on the district’s budget because it will depend on which teachers are picked for the new teacher leader positions and how much they earn out of the education fund, Hammack said.
The high school could have three teacher leaders. All of the teacher leaders will continue to work in classrooms, but just in a different way as they are responsible for “developing our already strong teachers with new strategies and tools,” she added.
The district will continue to work on ways to sustain the teacher leader model even after the grant funding is no longer available in five years. This could be done through eliminating positions that are paid out of the education fund through attrition in order to have the funds to pay for the teacher leaders.
At Brown County Junior High School, a teacher leader pilot program is already in place with teacher Sarah Cochran stepping into that role. The grant dollars allow this model to be expanded to all buildings now, Hammack said.
“I think this grant in particular is so exciting for our educators because it’s an affirmation of the really critical job that they do for us every single day,” she said of the grant.
Especially in a time where resources are continually pulled away from educators.
“Our Brown County educators, I’d put them up against any educator, truly, in the nation. They are phenomenal and it’s ridiculously exciting to know that they will be award with additional compensation for the efforts they really champion every day,” Hammack continued.
The grant dollars will also allow for teachers to have other opportunities within their career, like becoming a teacher leader and still remaining in the classroom.
“We hear the stories from other schools who are deploying the model, careers are reinvigorated as a result and folks kind of fall in love with teaching all over again,” she said.
“I think this is a monumental moment in time for our organization. There will be a profound focus on student achievement and the support and the resources will be there to honor that work. Many times in education we put a lot of extra on our educators without any kind of other compensation and this is the opposite of that.”
