Avoyelles School District issues extra supplement checks

In a time when most announcements about money is bad news, Avoyelles School District employees were given a little good news earlier this month.

The promised “budget surplus supplement” to last year’s teachers and support personnel who came back to the school district this year was handed out this past Wednesday (Oct. 10).

Superintendent Blaine Dauzat told School Board members at their Oct. 2 meeting that the district had hoped to issue the checks on Oct. 1, but could not meet that timetable. He told the board the supplement checks would be issued before Oct. 12.

Teachers received up to $1,000 and support personnel received up to $500. Employees who worked less than the full year in 2017-18 may have received a smaller supplement.

Only those teachers who worked in the school system last year and returned to the district this year were eligible for the special one-time supplement.

The intent was to show appreciation for employees’ loyalty who are the backbone of one of the lowest-paying and financially strapped public school systems in the state.

The supplement was made possible when the School Board ended the 2017-18 budget year with a $600,000 surplus instead of an anticipated deficit of several hundred thousand dollars.

Given the options of banking the surplus to cushion any future deficit or using the unexpected revenue to help its employees, the board picked the second choice.

TIF SUPPLEMENT UPDATE

In one of those good news/bad news items, Dauzat tackled head-on the controversy over the other recent extra payment to some teachers.

Dauzat told board members the Teacher Incentive Fund grant was awarded to Avoyelles Parish and 17 other “high poverty, high need districts” to specifically assist the school system in attracting and attaining teachers for its “high need, struggling schools and hard-to-fill positions.”

Teachers who met or exceeded performance goals in eight of the district’s 10 schools were eligible for incentive payments funded by remaining TIF grant revenue.

Teachers at Lafargue Elementary and LaSAS are not eligible for the incentive payment because those schools’ performance scores are above a “C.” Dauzat said teachers at those schools, and teachers at the other schools whose performance did not qualify for an incentive payment, are unhappy.

He explained that the grant’s purpose was not to give a payment supplement to every teacher, but to create a program that provides incentives for improvement and rewards those achievements.

Dauzat said one criticism he heard about the defeated 1-cent sales tax for school district salaries was that the School Board should reward good teachers and not just grant across-the-board raises to all teachers. Now the district is being criticized for rewarding just the high-performing teachers and not all teachers.

“I don’t think we should have said, ‘No, thank you’” when the state awarded APSD the incentive grant, Dauzat said.

“All teachers work hard and need more,” the superintendent continued, “but the TIF grant is for attracting and retraining teachers in hard-to-fill positions in our struggling schools.”

He noted there were no objections when the incentive payment was included in the parish’s TIF proposal, “but now that we are at the point of awarding those payments, we hear about it.”

‘NEGATIVE’ IS ‘POSITIVE’

In another issue, “negative” results were actually “positive news.”

“About a year and a half ago, this School Board decided to hold its student athletes to a higher standard,” Dauzat said. “We drug tested all student athletes prior to the start of their season and all athletes were subject to random drug tests after the start of the season.” Dauzat said that so far this football season, no athlete’s test at the three football-playing high schools has been positive for drugs.

“The coaches and players need to be commended for their efforts,” he added.

Dauzat said the good news should help to dispel the mistaken perception of widespread drug use among the district’s students.