Editor's note: Candidates for mayor of Springfield, City Council and school board were invited to submit a column in their own words explaining why they are seeking election April 4, or focusing on a topic of their choosing. School board candidate columns were published in ballot order. Links to other candidate's views may be found at the end of this column.
OPINION |
My name is Landon McCarter, and you will see my name first on the ballot for the April 4th election for Springfield Public School Board. I am working hard to gather community support and listen to the concerns of not only the parents of SPS students but also workers inside the SPS district. I would like to take this opportunity to address a specific concern that I see that affects a large portion of our SPS staff.
I want to address the pay changes that were announced recently that change the actual pay schedule to not allow 9 months of work to be paid over 12 months. This pay change affected almost 1,100 of our employees' paychecks, and I have heard in recent board meetings that there is a survey released by those that were affected and up to 87 percent of people affected were against this change. I have heard very difficult stories of how this pay change will very much affect the finances of our school system’s extremely important positions such as interpreters, paraprofessionals, kitchen staff, classroom LPN’s, behavior techs, custodians, secretaries, and more positions.
In the face of record early retirements and valued team members leaving our district at record numbers, we must make every effort to attract and keep talent. As a business owner for 14 years, I can personally attest that one of the quickest ways to lose your valuable team members is to mess with their pay. I understand that the net amount of pay is not going down. The solution that the district gave to help employees with this decision was to “help them budget.” I find this solution tone deaf and a little condescending at best. We MUST do everything we can to keep and attract the people that work so hard for these kids.
If I am elected, I personally would like to advocate for the following solution. As board members, we will have fiduciary oversight of the operating budget. I am under the impression that there is a third party that we are paying to help implement a new HR and payroll system. We must lean on the third party to help our internal teams build out a reasonable system inside our payroll system to give employees the choice.
As an SPS employee, do you want the old way of being paid, or the new way of being paid? It cannot be that difficult to give these valuable employees the choice that best suits their family’s needs. We are a district with a $340,000,000 a year budget. It should not be too much to ask to build out an HR process and procedure to help us keep and recruit for some of the toughest jobs in the district.
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