By June 30, 2025, our District’s collective bargaining agreement (CBA) is set to expire and the Teachers’ Union wants a pay-raise and tax hikes to pay for it. Our Board authorized a ballot question for a 10.63% tax increase while our conservative directors are purposefully campaigning against it. This strategy worked! The Union recently approved a more taxpayer-friendly CBA after a public outcry at the ballot question. The new CBA limits total annual payroll to a 1% increase, whereas the Union usually enjoyed at least a 4% increase in prior years. As a result, our conservative directors saved taxpayers more than a quarter of a million dollars this year!

 

What is the Current Compensation for Our Teachers?

For the 2024-2025 School Year, our District’s teachers are the highest compensated in Berks County. 76% (89 out of 117) of our teachers earn more than $84,745.00 per school year. In fact, 18% (21 out of 117) earn more than $110,000.00 per school year. Sick leave, health insurance and pension benefits are additional.

 

How Does That Compare to the Berks County Average?

95% (111 out of 117) of our teachers are above the Berks County Average, but the extent of that is shocking. 76% (89 out of 117) are between five and 30 percentage points above the County Average. That top 18% of teachers that receive more than $110,000 per school year are 18 percentage points above the County Average.

 

What are the Privileges of Employment as a Teacher?

Factoring out mandatory “in-service” days, teachers still enjoy two months off and 19 holidays each calendar year. They also enjoy 10 sick days and one or two paid personal days off.

 

The minimum retirement benefit is set for the age of 55. Roughly 30% of a teacher’s salary is mandatory pension contributions paid by the district.

 

There is no employee in our country who has better job protection than the public school teacher. While all the rest of us have “at-will” employment, no teacher can be terminated, suspended, or demoted unless for “just cause.” If an aggrieved teacher appeals an adverse employment decision, the School Code requires a vote of six out of nine school directors to uphold the discipline after a hearing is held.  Hence, why we see teachers putting their spouses or relatives as candidates for the Board of School Directors through the Democratic Party.

 

If a school district downsizes the number of teachers due to economic hardship, the Public School Code requires seniority to be prioritized in deciding which teachers are “furloughed” and to rehire such teachers if funding becomes available. 

 

How Did This Happen?

In 2018, a liberal-controlled School Board approved a CBA which took effect in 2019 and contained a significant pay schedule. It modifies the base salary on the number of years a teacher worked for our District and, additionally, whether a teacher obtained a higher education and credit hours offered by the Berks County Intermediate Unit. Colloquially, we call this “Step” (the number of years worked) and “Column” (the higher education and number of credit hours).

 

On the Pay Schedule, the Step increases vertically and the Column increases horizontally, both increasing the base pay. Therefore, every teacher who moves each Column will enjoy a compounding effect as the Steps increase for each year of employment. With the 2019 CBA in effect, many teachers maxed out the number of credit hours paid for by the taxpayers.

 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the liberal-controlled School Board voted to extend the CBA until June 30, 2025, even though it wasn’t set to expire until June 30, 2022. What was perverse was that the Board used COVID-19 money from the American Rescue Plan Act to fund its handsome compensation for teachers, thereby conditioning their wealth on the plight of a “public emergency,” to the detriment of our students and their families.

 

There’s no evidence that additional courses or doctorates have any discernible benefit for our District. Many Master’s Degree programs offered by teachers’ colleges focus on Leftist agendas, such as Critical Race Theory, transgenderism, Queer Studies, etc. Some of these courses, such as educational equity, cannot be constitutionally followed in a public school setting, where school districts are bound to adhere to the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

​

Who was Appointed to the Negotiations Team?

Jason Koch, our President of the Board, appointed the members of the Negotiations Team and wisely avoided any school director who had a relative employed by our District. Besides himself, Jason appointed school directors Jeremiah Light (Rep., Greenwich Township), Dan Wismer (Rep., Greenwich Township), and Caecilia Holt (Dem., Kutztown). The Union wanted to sit at both sides of the table to renegotiate the CBA, but Jason Koch successfully blocked that.

 

What Happens Next?

In early May, the Teachers’ Union responded to the public outcry at a possible 10.63% increase in property taxes and approved a new CBA. As mentioned, it caps total annual payroll to a 1% increase. But it will expire in 2027. This creates another opportunity for the Union to try again at raising salaries. If the public will rally behind Jason Koch, Jeremiah Light, Erin Engel, and our conservative school directors and financially support KASD Children First PAC for bringing this information to you and other voters, and if our teachers will privately ask their Union representatives to do the right thing, then the Board can continue to insist on better terms that don’t involve heavily taxing our community or robbing from our children through debt-spending and by failing to invest in our infrastructure, like Greenwich Elementary School.

 

For any voters who personally know the teachers of our District, the problem isn’t them but with their Union. The message for our teachers is: Be grateful for what you already have. When the Union pushes our District into a financial deficit, as it now has, the District is pressured to make-up the difference by reducing the number of teachers and thereby increasing the per-pupil class size. When the dust settles, the more senior teachers kept their jobs but caused their less senior colleagues to lose theirs.

 

Without a new CBA, it falls onto the public to rally in support of our directors and ask them to hold the line.