Raises To Their Raises?

The concept of a salary schedule is new to many people in the regular working world. In essence, it's a simple grid of salary steps that allow for graduated pay increases. However, it makes the math around raises and percentages much more complex.

When most of us hear the idea of a 3% raise we imagine taking our current salary and adding 3%, right? Well that's not how it works when you are within a salary schedule, and the NFT community salary schedule is no different. Each cell of the teacher schedule accounts for movement both vertically and horizontally. Each movement has a % raise built-in. So a 3% raise to the entire schedule could be something closer to a 30% raise to a single employee. Here's how:

If you are a teacher in the NFT community who is currently on step 10, after 10 years of eligible service, you move up to step 11 (vertical) at the start of the next school year. Both your previous and next salaries are additionally based on your number of credits (horizontal). It is this combination that places you into a single cell. Let's take 2 different scenarios to continue this example.

Masters +30, year 10: $84,081 Masters +30, year 11: $89,920 Raise: 6.9%

Masters +30, year 10: $84,081 Masters +40, year 11: $95,923 Raise: 14%

The above example is based entirely on the existing schedule as it has been since the 2007-08 school year. If we now take the 2.75% increase proposed by the teachers union and apply it to the same situation we get:

Masters +30, year 10: $84,081 Masters +30, year 11: $92,393 Raise: 9.8%

Masters +30, year 10: $84,081 Masters +40, year 11: $98,561 Raise: 17.2%

Retro Pay is the application of these pay raises to the school years that have passed since 2008. In this case, the previous example would apply retroactively to the 2008-2009 school year. Then there would be another 2.75% increase applied to the 2009-2010 school year. Then we'd finally get to this school year where an additional 3% increase would be applied. Confused yet?

Step 10 Masters +30 2007-08: $84,081 Step 10 Masters +30 2008-09: $86,393 Step 10 Masters +30 2009-10: $88,769 Step 10 Masters +30 2010-11: $91,432 Step 11 Masters +30 2011-12: $100,715

+2.75% +2.75% +3% Retro Pay Owed: $14,351 2011-12 Raise: 19.8%

The above examples assumes no horizontal movement when going into the 2011-12 school year. If this teacher from the NFT community had completed the required 40 additional credits, however, they would've moved both vertically (10 to 11) and horizontally (+30 to +40) to start the next year. That would look like this:

Step 10 Masters +30 2007-08: $84,081 Step 11 Masters +40 2011-12: $107,438

Retro Pay Owed: $14,351 2011-12 Raise: 27.8%

That's a lot more than 3% isn't it?

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