My name is Dr. Trudy Jermanovich.
I’m hoping to reach the Board through emails and the public comment section. I believe along with the wording of the ballot language, how the referendum funds are distributed will be of prime importance to convince the voters to continue to support this initiative.
Because the Board did not catch the bonuses given to upper level administrators, the way the funds are distributed should be made very clear today.

Here are some guardrails which I believe you should consider before you have the final vote on distribution at the next Board Meeting. One of reasons you had some upper level administrators given thousands of dollars erroneously was because it’s very difficult to know when you allow some of the various groups to put in an across the board 5.5% raise. When the public doesn’t know what the various people in the organization make, you cannot estimate how much each person will receive from the Referendum funds. In some cases they received far more that the highest paid teacher received from referendum money.

My simple solution is that the organizational chart for administrators should contain an actual range of salary for all to see in order to have complete transparency. If you have someone holding a position, then their specific salary should be printed on the organizational chart. This information should be given to the public since it has already been provided at a Board Meeting when they were hired at that level.

Next, I feel in order to provide even more transparency and to encourage people with more experience to stay in the system, each negotiation group should follow what was developed for teachers in the most recent salary schedule. Unfortunately, this was not provided in the presentation packet. I’m not sure why that was left out since that is the basic reason you are going to the voters to ask for a continuation of referendum dollars. Teachers with any experience receive from $1000. up to $12,500.

The public can look at the chart and see that a teacher with more experience is being compensated accordingly with referendum dollars.

All employee groups should follow this model.