Greetings, Albemarle County Public Schools educators: I am writing to share information about the results from the recent compensation survey that 60% of our teachers completed. I want to thank everyone for taking time to complete the survey. We value our teachers. You have a tremendous responsibility to educate and care for our young people, and you work hard. In light of this, our School Board recently asked us to study your compensation so that they may deliberate any changes to our Board adopted strategies that may appear necessary. The survey is just one component to our study, but the information gathered should prove quite useful to inform other phases.

The School Board and Board of Supervisors (the “Boards”) approved a Total Compensation Strategy to target classified/administrative employee salaries at the median and teacher salaries at the 75% percentile of their joint adopted competitive market, with benefits slightly above market levels. The Boards continue to recognize the importance of providing competitive salaries and benefits to attract and retain high quality teachers; teachers who are constantly learning, continuously adapting, and who challenge every child to pursue his or her individual dreams. As we have not comprehensively reviewed the teacher Compensation strategy since 2005, the School Board directed staff at the December 8, 2016, meeting to evaluate the current teacher compensation strategy to ensure alignment with Division objectives.

We conducted the Teacher Survey as part of this evaluation to identify our teachers’ opinions in regards to their work, compensation and engagement.

Thank you! Over 60% of you participated in this survey; we are so glad you took the time to share your feedback. View the summary survey results and themes »

Areas of focus include:

• Most of you (93.5%) feel that you are not adequately compensated for your work. For those of you who feel their compensation is inadequate, the single largest contributor to that feeling is working too many hours beyond contract hours (90.3%).
• Most of you feel like you belong in your school (83.3%) and are enthusiastic about your work (87.3%).
• Slightly over half of you had a neutral or negative response about recognition for your work (52.7%).

What’s next? We are now holding focus groups in order to better understand some of the issues and to identify solutions. In addition, a formalized team (5-6 teachers from various schools and levels is working with an external compensation consultant in reviewing our strategy, to include:

• Gathering feedback from school leadership, teachers and administrators
• Analyzing external data, research viable special pay scales for hard to fill jobs
• Researching good system/best practice norms for teacher compensation
• Developing summary of findings and recommendations

We will share the findings and recommendations with the School Board in June. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Regards,

Lorna Gerome
Director of Human Resources