The Clear Lake Community School District’s Board of Education held a special meeting on Monday, April 29, for a public hearing on the proposed Fiscal Year 2025 school budget. The budget, along with tax levy information, was mailed to everyone living in the district per the new state legislation. The school budget was passed, however, the matter of teacher pay is still in the negotiation stage.
The same legislative bill that decided the fate of the state’s Area Education Agencies also raised teacher salaries. With the beginning of the 2024/25 school year new teachers will receive $47,500, which will be bumped up to $50,000 the following year. Teachers with 12 years of experience or more will receive $60,000 for the next school year, and be bumped up to $62,000 for the 2025/26 school year. Clear Lake school district superintendent Doug Gee said the state is giving school districts Teacher Salary Supplement (TSS) money to cover the cost of raising teacher salaries.
“It’s good for some of those teachers, but you’re going to have teachers that have been teaching six, seven years that are going to be making the same as a brand new teacher. And there are some teachers that don’t like that, per se, but I like the fact that our teachers are getting more money,” Gee said in an earlier interview. “We’ll be able to pay our teachers and we’ll make up for that with that TSS to pay the increase. Some of the worries for superintendents right now though is how long they’re gonna continue to fund this jump in pay. Because right now they’re saying they’re going to this year and next year, but four or five years down the road, are they going to say, well, we’re not going to fund that minimum salary anymore.”
Gee said they are also planning on giving a raise to those teachers whose salary falls between $47,500 and $60,000, but that raise percentage has not been decided yet.
During the special meeting representatives of the Clear Lake Education Association brought their base wage proposal to the school board. In addition to raising the base wage to the new minimum of $47,500 the CLEA also proposed an increase of $2,750 for any full time employee and a $500 increase to the extracurricular generator base bringing the proposal to a 4.12 percent total package.
The rationale behind the proposal stemmed from the school district receiving a little over $185,000 of new TSS money and also $115,000 of new money just through regular state aid.
So the actual total cost of the district would be $60,000. The school board was told that this was in line with other school district settlements.
Clear Lake school board president Cheryl Bervig countered with 3.1 percent raise. “Everybody gets $1,500 and we will keep the $750 for the people that will reach 15 years this year,” she said.
When told that the $1,500 was probably the lowest settlement in North Iowa and that the CLEA wouldn’t settle for that, a motion was made to table the tentative agreement to a later date while the matter went back into negotiations.
