Recruiting & Retaining Experience Tough in Orange

At the April 12^th OCPS School Board meeting, Scott Howatt, Chief Negotiator for Orange County Public Schools and the Senior Executive Director of Planning, Governmental, and Labor Relations, presented a summary of information to the OCPS School Board that included startling information about the makeup of teachers in OCPS.  Howatt was trying to counter the notion that teacher salaries in OCPS are not as low as media and others have reported.  Howatt provided a comparison of OCPS salaries and salaries of other districts in Florida.  The “big seven” districts in Florida include: Broward, Duval, Hillsborough, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Pinellas, and Orange.  Beginning salaries for teachers run from a beginning low in Hillsborough of $37,150 to an end of career high in Palm Beach of $76,930.  Orange sits near the bottom of base salaries, though, starting salaries at $39,000 with a maximum career-high of $70,750.




Howatt presented information to the school board that said OCPS teachers work with an average of 9.09 years of experience.  However, he removed a segment of teachers, including charter teachers, from his calculation.  He did not indicate that these segments of teachers were removed from the reported average years of experience of the other counties.  This number is far below the average years of experience in Brevard of 14.19 and Broward of 13.27.  Nearby Seminole County has an average experience level of 12.63 years and Osceola of 11.02.

Howatt also reported to the Board that “24% of our teachers have less than three years’ experience,” an amazing statistic for the tenth largest school system in the country, as stated on the OCPS website.   He also noted a voluntary separation rate of about 7.6% of the total 13,700 teachers, indicating a voluntary annual separation number of about 1,041 teachers.  Such numbers represent a tremendous expense to the district and the taxpayers of Orange County.

Howatt applauded the two-year “6.3% increase in salary” that OCPS and the Orange County Classroom Teachers Association had bargained last year.  However, his statement was criticized by the union’s executive director, Mark Erwin Mitchell, because the 6.3% was not, in fact, an across the board increase, but rather an increase of set amounts of money for each teacher based on performance, which would have translated to a far less percentage increase for many teachers. Mitchell stated Howatt’s presentation was “misleading,” framing his comments as a concern begging the question why “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of teachers are leaving OCPS throughout the year and each year.”

Howatt touted a $1,000 increase for teachers to attend summer training classes while Mitchell sounded the alarm that “OCPS is less and less attractive of an employer for many, many teachers.” Mitchell ended his criticism of Howatt and the OCPS with the statement that “the district has turned over management of instructional personnel to a contractor, LSI, who instructed APs and principals to grade low, to force a bell curve, and … it resulted in Orange County being 65^th out of 67 (districts) in how teachers were evaluated.”  LSI is Learning Sciences International, the company founded in cooperation with Dr. Robert Marzano, the evaluation system designer for the OCPS evaluation system of teachers.

Wendy Doromal, the president-elect of the OCCTA indicated that she was “disappointed” with the way that teacher evaluations and salaries had been handled by OCPS in recent years.  She criticized the presentation by Howatt and noted that the value of taking responsibility for mistakes seemed to be lacking. “We need a consistent and fair system,” she chided.  After the meeting, Mitchell said that Howatt’s explanation and treatment of the information provided to the school board was “shameless.”

Dr. Carl Howard is an Orlando teacher and union member.