It is an early Christmas present from President Obama. For years, many white collar American workers have been forced to work long hours without being paid overtime if they were considered salaried. But starting Dec. 1, an estimated 4.2 million salaried workers in the U.S. will no longer be exempt from U.S. Department of Labor overtime regulations.
Currently someone paid $455 per week ($23,660 per year) can be considered salaried and required to work overtime without being paid extra. The new DOL laws changes the salary threshold to $913 per week ($47,476 per year).
But there is a glaring exception to this new rule. Teachers are exempt if their primary duty is teaching, tutoring, instructing or lecturing. They can still be forced to work unlimited hours of overtime without any additional compensation. Fail to work those extra hours and your contract might not be renewed.
Open houses, parent-teacher conferences, trips with students to competitions, ballgames, band or choir concerts, serving as faculty advisor to student groups, holiday gatherings and many other things add a lot of extra hours to what is required of teachers to prepare for classes, conduct the classes, grade papers and fill out tons of paperwork. Many teachers don’t have evenings and weekends off. They have to use those to get caught up. It isn’t unusual for teachers to work 60 hours a week or more.
And then there are accountability standards. Teachers today have limited flexibility in lesson planning because they have to teach for the test. Teachers and schools get ranked not by how well they teach, but how well they teach to the test. Testing disrupts the classroom, as well. Students aren’t learning while they are being tested. There are also an increasing mandates and expectations.
Public school teachers in Arkansas are the fifth lowest paid in the nation earning on average about $46,600 per year. So, if it weren’t for the exemption, most teachers would have to be paid overtime under the new labor laws.
What is it we are saying about teachers being one of the lowest paid professions that require at least a bachelor’s degree from college? That we don’t value education? Or maybe we don’t value children? They are just kids, after all. Or is it just that a high percentage of school teachers are women, and we don’t think women’s work is as valuable as men’s work?
Then there is the issue of administrators. How much support do they give teachers in situations like disputes with students? I knew a teacher in Mississippi who left the profession after being violently attacked in the classroom by a student. The student wasn’t charged with assault and she had to continue to face him at school every day.
Because of small class sizes, teachers in Eureka Springs might have to teach a large number of different classes instead of teaching one subject to different groups of students. Each different class requires preparation time.
For about six years recently, teachers at the Eureka Springs School District didn’t even receive cost-of-living adjustments. They did finally receive a small cost-of-living adjustment about a year ago. Perhaps the district spent so much on bricks and mortar for the new high school that there isn’t enough money left to better compensate the teachers.
Teachers are rarely in it for the money. Most care deeply about positively impacting the lives of every student in their classroom.
One thing that can chafe for teachers is that those who work 60 hours a week get paid the same as those who aren’t working nearly as hard.
“I don’t want to pay more property taxes,” a local teacher told me. “I get it. But there are things that don’t cost anything. There are ways to reduce the workload like modified block schedules that don’t cost the school anything, but help teachers.”
And how about incentives for teachers? If they bring in a grant for the school, give the teacher a percentage of that grant to compensate for the time it took to get the grant.
School boards need to find creative, out-of-the-box ways to compensate teachers. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit to be harvested resulting in greater teacher compensation or satisfaction without asking taxpayers to further open their wallets.