Lynda Harris, a 40-year-old Gainesville resident, works seasonal jobs for many reasons. If she needs clothes, she works in clothing retail. If she wants house furnishings, she works at craft stores, she said.
While working seasonally, Harris’ full-time job is teaching third grade at Carolyn Beatrice Parker Elementary, spending nearly 70 hours a week. Without a livable wage, Harris has to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, she said.
“Personally, it’s just a slap in the face,” she said. “I feel like they’re [school board] sitting there as if they don’t understand what our position is.”
Alachua County educators and the school board are at an impasse, or a deadlock, over this year’s salary negotiations.
The Alachua County Education Association, the county’s teachers’ union, proposed a 3.2% salary increase for the 2024-25 school year. The Alachua County School Board proposed half that amount. The ongoing dispute has union members raising concerns about impacts on staff morale and retention as the school year progresses.
Union members raise concerns
Kristen Zunker, a 47-year-old first-grade teacher at Littlewood Elementary, said she’s “never not worked an extra job” in her 24-year teaching career. In addition to teaching first graders, she works in school team leader roles and teaches summer school.
“For me, it’s a huge issue with ‘How much do I matter?’” she said. “I don’t understand why the struggle always has to be to pay the people who make the biggest impact. The expectation of who I am as a teacher has changed dramatically.”
Zunker said increased expectations include taking on more formal “support” roles for students, especially regarding mental health. Statewide policies indicate teachers must complete youth mental health awareness and youth suicide awareness and prevention training. Additional training is provided through the district, in adherence to statewide policies.
Zunker said among the extra pressure, she doesn’t teach for the money.
“I do this job to make a difference in the world,” she said. “At the same time, I would like to be respected.”
Alachua County’s elementary school teacher salary is 3.8% lower than state averages and 14.8% lower than national averages, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Carmen Ward, president of ACEA, said the organization’s power is a “collective voice that gets to negotiate salary and rights.”
Teacher salaries are negotiated every year. For the 2023-24 school year, teachers received a 3.5% salary increase, with retroactive pay from the beginning of the contract period, which was in early July 2023. Retroactive pay is the compensation a teacher receives from a prior pay after a salary increase.
Ward said ACEA’s original proposal for the 2024-25 school year was a 5% salary increase, and the district provided an original proposal of 1.56% in April.
After lowering its offer 11 times, ACEA stayed put on a 3.2% increase, while the ACSB held a 1.6% offer.
For every yearly contract, there are nearly 3,300 bargaining members, or employees represented by the union, of which 2,000 are active union members, Ward said.
Frustrated by the negotiations, Ward and nearly 40 teachers and community members rallied to express their concerns at a Sept. 17 ACSB meeting. The rally was motivated by pushback from ACSB, which argued that if a decision was not agreed upon, no retroactive pay would be given.
“They [ACSB] were trying to strong-arm the union into agreeing to their terrible offer,” she said. “They cannot unilaterally make any of these decisions. I am never going to agree to that nonsense.”
Ward said retroactive pay was provided for many years before this contract, including last year.
ACEA is not interested in lowering its salary proposals, she said.
“Investing money in the public school employees should be a priority for the board,” she said.
Danielle Engelhorn, a 42-year-old third-grade teacher at Parker Elementary, works after-school tutoring, teaches summer school and does freelance photography to make ends meet.
Engelhorn said she feels replaceable through the negotiations with the ACSB.
“When you sacrifice so much and you give so much of your personal time to the school and to the community,” she said. “If your very bosses aren’t going to have your back, then no one is going to have your back.”
Florida is seeing a statewide teacher and staff shortage. In January, the Florida Education Association reported more than 7,500 vacancies across the K-12 system.
Engelhorn worries the replacement of teachers with long-term substitutes affects the quality of education in Alachua County, she said.
“The long-term subs have not had the years of education, experience, training and science to understand adequately how to teach this material,” she said. “When I receive a student that has come from a long-term sub situation, I have to do extra duties to try to make up those gaps.”
Cynthia Chiari is a 60-year-old Exceptional Student Education paraprofessional at Idylwild Elementary, working with autistic children. Working in a self-contained classroom, she said she feels her job is different from most.
“We do a lot more than what is expected of us,” she said. “We sometimes have to chase after kids, keeping kids in the classrooms, keeping children from kicking, spitting.”
In addition to her job, Chiari works in a group home. She said she feels neither ACEA or ACSB’s proposals would change her financial situation.
Chiari emphasized how a teacher’s living wage is affected by the number of children or working members in the household. In Alachua County, the required income before taxes for a single-parent, one-child household is nearly $75,000.
Even though some days are harder than others, Chiari said she loves her job.
Community impacts
Oliver Flanagan, a 16-year-old Santa Fe High School junior, said he sees how “undervalued” teachers are by the staff shortages at his school.
“My freshman year … we had a long-term sub for the entire year, during the entire class period,” he said. “We have too many people in the classrooms who don’t have enough teachers.”
Flanagan said he found advancements to the curriculum rather than teacher pay or school improvement the most frustrating.
“You have all these new things, and you still have AC in the buildings at my school that doesn’t work,” he said. “Teachers are the backbone of our education system. I would argue that they’re also the backbone of our communities.”
Throughout his years in school, Flanagan said his teachers have made a “profound impact” on him.
“It takes a village to raise a child, and teachers are a part of that,” he said. “They have fully developed who I am as a person. Even if there are teachers who may not be the best … they’re still people who deserve a living wage.”
District’s perspective
ACPS spokesperson Jackie Johnson said the school board’s 1.6% offer was influenced by the financial challenges of this school year.
Major factors include the state ceasing Elementary and Secondary Educational Relief funding, which brought more than $95 million to ACPS to recover from the pandemic.
Student enrollment lost to private, charter and alternative schools is also an issue, where ACPS loses about $8,800 per student. Current enrollment counts won’t be released until October, Johnson said.
“We also have significantly higher costs for almost everything,” she said. “What’s in our budget today may not be in our budget after that October account.”
Although ACEA claims there was a “budget increase,” Johnson said the state breakdown of funding isn’t calculated the same as it was in previous years.
Instead of dividing funding into categories, such as transportation and instructional materials, the state “rolled in” funding into the regular budget.
“So, they say, ‘Oh the money is still there, it’s just mixed in now with all the rest of your budget,’” she said. “You don’t end up having money to do all the things you’re required to do because all that money is not separate. You can’t account for it separately.”
As for the statewide teacher shortage, Johnson said ACPS is continuing to go “well beyond Florida’s borders to recruit.”
However, Johnson also said recruitment dynamics aren’t just one “silver bullet,” but a “combination of activities and efforts that [ACPS] has to put in to recruit and retain more people.”
The pushback against retroactive pay was an “incentive in the hopes of getting a contract settled,” she said.
“We want to be able to provide higher salaries for all our employees,” Johnson said. “If we were in a better financial situation and not facing such enormous financial pressures and uncertainties this year, we could do what we have done in previous years.”
If a settlement cannot be reached by Oct. 1, the next step would be for both ACSB and ACEA to present their proposals to a third-party mediator, who then will make a recommendation to the school board. If both parties still don’t make an agreement afterward, then both would have to present in front of the state Public Employees Relation Commission.
Johnson said ACPS is holding firm on the 1.6% offer.
Broader education policy
Chris Thomas, a 37-year-old UF assistant professor of educational policy and leadership, said salary disputes between teachers unions and school boards, including impasses, are “extremely common.”
“Salary is an absolutely massive piece of school district budgets,” he said. “I don’t think they’re becoming more frequent as much as they’ve always been kind of a fact of life.”
Thomas said a school district typically spends about 80% of its budget on salaries and other costs associated with employees.
According to ACSB’s 2023-24 budget summary, instructional appropriations including teacher benefits accounted for nearly 93% of its budget. However, only about 52% of Alachua County’s budget is spent solely on teachers’ salaries.
“The challenge is, we’re talking about big numbers,” Thomas said. “While it might not seem like a huge difference, that could mean millions of dollars in new costs.”
Another challenge posed to these negotiations is the Florida No-Strike law, where no public employee or employee organization may participate in a strike against an employer, according to Florida statutes. Penalties for teachers include termination, fines or a revocation of certificates.
Thomas feels salary negotiations don’t affect the quality of education because “teachers don’t go into education for the money,” he said.
Union and district negotiations are often a symptom of the circumstances created by the state, Thomas said. A voice for state precedents such as funding and limitations is “missing from the table” in these negotiations.
“The conflict between the district and the union isn’t necessarily the most productive place to have those conversations about whether or not schools need more money,” he said. “Those conversations have to happen at the state level. If we want to raise more money for education, that’s where it needs to happen.”
Thomas said parents should know that “everyone really has the student’s best interests at heart.”
“Employee working conditions are students’ learning conditions,” he said. “How we treat our teachers directly influences their experience in the classroom. They need to be valued, and they need to feel valued.”
Contact Sara-James Ranta at sranta@alligator.org. Follow her on X @sarajamesranta.
Sara-James Ranta is a third-year journalism major, minoring in sociology of social justice and policy. Previously, she served as a general assignment reporter for The Alligator's university desk.
