Compression, shortage differentials, and professional development would all get funding
Posted: March 22, 2022
The state House Committee on Labor and Tourism Tuesday voted to approve key bills aimed to pay teachers based on their years of service, secure funding for shortage differentials, and reinstate 21 hours of job-embedded professional development.
The bills will next be considered by the important House Finance Committee.
Proposal to fix salary compression for thousands of teachers advances
Senate Bill 2819, SD2, HD1 would guarantee that teachers in Hawaii, like their counterparts around the United States, have their salaries adjusted based on their years of experience, meaning more than 8,000 of our members would see corrections in their salaries to help keep them in the profession longer.
Hawaii State Teachers Association President Osa Tui, Jr. told the committee, “Without our salary schedule being tied to years of service as is done in many jurisdictions, we’ve had spans of years where incoming teachers were placed at the same salary step as those with a number of years of service already served.”
Tui warned lawmakers, “This is now coming to a head as those decisions in the past are affecting large swaths of teachers who are or will soon be reaching the age where they have the option to retire. Seeing no hope for ever reaching their career salary, as we see with teachers who have over 30 years of service, teachers are saying, ‘I’m going to retire as soon as I can do so.’
“Losing more and more of these experienced teachers will be devastating for our keiki. Every teacher we lose is one more that needs to be recruited and it’s already becoming more and more difficult to recruit new hires to the teaching profession,” Tui said.
The committee amended the bill to fund a memorandum of understanding once salary adjustments are negotiated, and took the HSTA’s recommendation to include the governor and Board of Education among the parties involved.
View: Bill status | Testimony
Committee approves measure to fund shortage differentials
SB 2820, SD2 would secure permanent funding for the differentials currently in place to combat shortages in special education, Hawaiian language immersion, and geographically hard-to-fill areas.
Since their start in January of 2020, shortage differentials have been funded by the Hawaii State Department of Education at the direction of the Hawaii Board of Education, and have proven to decrease teacher shortages in these critical areas.
View: Bill status | Testimony
Despite ‘stock’ state testimony, salary proposals support collective bargaining process
The Hawaii Office of Collective Bargaining (OCB) submitted written testimony that the bills are “premature” and do “not embrace the spirit of collective bargaining.”
Tui argued against the idea, noting that the bills address a chronic barrier in negotiating attempts to resolve Hawaii’s teacher shortage crisis.
“(OCB is) essentially saying this is putting the cart before the horse. Without these types of measures, there is no cart, and all we find behind the horse time and time again is a pile of horse poop,” Tui told lawmakers. “All this bill will do is set aside funding. Those in the Legislature are not the ones who do the negotiating.
“Continually we hear ‘There is no money for that,’ but not solutions on how to come up with the money,” Tui said. “HSTA has tried over and over to come up with solutions to find money, but always hit brick walls. Now we see money to make things a reality and OCB says it cannot be done because they didn’t come up with it themselves.”
Rep. Della Au Belatti (D, Makiki, Tantalus, Papakolea, McCully, Pawaa, Manoa) also questioned the state’s lack of solutions. “What frustrates me is that OCB keeps coming back and gives us kind of stock testimony about why we can’t do this,” she said.
“I would like to know at some point from OCB, what are they doing more proactively to ensure that all of our government workforce is stronger than it has been in the past?” Belatti said. “I get it that collective bargaining is something that is enshrined in our laws, but the government workforce shortages facing entities across the nation is tremendous, and it just concerns me that OCB is always saying no rather than saying, ‘How can we?’”
Committee unanimously passes measure to fund 21 hours of professional development
SB 3209, SD2 would restore educators’ 21 hours of job-embedded professional development, which was removed from the contract last year due to budget cuts, resulting in a 1.5% pay reduction for teachers.
Restoring paid professional development would provide teachers the chance to hone their skillset and achieve higher pay while being compensated for conducting work activities outside of regular working hours.
Kawehi Bringas, a senior at Kalaheo High School, testified in person before the committee. “As a student, I’ve had experiences where some teachers were not fully prepared for some lessons which limited my chance and my peers’ chances to learn further,” she said. “So I think if you support this bill, it’ll help support not only our school as a whole, but through its teachers and its students.”
Lawmakers passed the measure in a unanimous vote.
View: Bill status | Testimony
All three bills are subject to amendment and change and the final outcome will not be clear unless and until lawmakers pass the bills in some form and they become law with or without the governor’s signature.