Substitute teachers for Creston Community School District will make $120 per day starting in the 2018-19 school year, after the CCSD Board of Directors unanimously approved a pay increase during Monday’s regular meeting.
The increase marks a jump from the current pay of $100 per day for substitute teachers.
CCSD Superintendent Steve McDermott reported to the board that several area schools currently offer more pay for substitute teachers than Creston Community School District, and others are planning to increase their pay.
“My recommendation is we move ours to $120 a day, and then Billie Jo’s (Greene) recommendation, which I agree with wholeheartedly, let’s start there and then as we incrementally increase contracts for staff, let’s say roughly 2 percent, let’s just take that 2 percent and add it to that substitute pay each year,” McDermott said.
McDermott said that would be a more consistent way to approach substitute teacher pay as opposed to what the district has historically done, which is stay at one price for several years and then make a larger jump in pay.
“We’ve got to compete for subs. They’re hard to get,” McDermott said.
According to CCSD Business Manager Billie Jo Greene, the number of substitute teachers used has decreased in recent years.
“We’ve got 170 in ‘14-15, 187 in ‘15-16 and in ‘16-17 we had 150,” Greene reported to the board. “To date, which we’ve already done payroll in May, which is for April’s payroll, so we just have one more month for subs, we’re at 143. We’ve made progress over time.”
McDermott said part of the reason for the decrease in number of substitute teachers paid is a shift in how the district does in-service days.
“We’ve gone to all-day in-service, so fewer subs that way. We’ve moved our CCC meetings to outside school days. We’ve done some things to eliminate the need for subs,” McDermott said. “We don’t have the built-in absences with our all-day meetings like we did at one point.”
The number of substitute teachers paid in 2016-17 and 2017-18 could have been even lower, but Greene said illness hit the district’s teachers hard in each of those years.
“We’ve had a lot of sickness,” she said. “We’ve had the influenza hit us hard.”