The Governor's Teacher Pay Order: What It Does to Franklin Parish
Last week I walked through how the MFP works and said I did not want a teacher raise paid for by gutting the rest of the formula. The order is here now. The governor signed it Tuesday, the day after the session ended with no deal. I read all four pages and ran the numbers for our parish. Here is what it does to us, close to the dollar.
First, the good part, because it is real.
Our teachers and support staff will not take a pay cut this year. Last year this stipend brought about $713,000 to Franklin's teachers and support staff, around $500,000 to teachers and $213,000 to support workers. Every teacher gets $2,000. Every support worker gets $1,000. The governor says administrators are left out this year, so our number will run a little lower, but the people in the classroom are covered. After three hard years, that money matters, and I am glad they are getting it.
And the governor is right about one thing. Louisiana led the nation in reading growth, two years running. Our kids and our teachers earned that, which makes what comes next harder to explain.
Now the part the headline skips.
This is not a raise. It is the same $2,000 and $1,000 stipend the state has paid for three straight years, nothing new for teachers. What changed is where the money comes from. For three years the stipend was added on top of school budgets. This year it is carved out of them. The order pulls $168 million out of the MFP, the formula that funds every public school, and routes it back as the stipend.
So the money has to come from somewhere, and here I have to be straight with you about what we know and what we do not. The order does not say how the $168 million will be split between districts. It hands that job to the state Department of Education and BESE, and they have not published a parish breakdown yet. I cannot give you Franklin's exact cut today. Nobody can.
What I can prove is this. The cut is 4.18 percent of the state's $4.02 billion MFP appropriation. Franklin's most recent audited MFP revenue is $19.8 million, and it already makes up about 42 percent of everything our schools take in. A proportional share of the cut runs roughly $810,000 to $830,000. Treat that as an estimate, not a final figure, but it is the honest range until the state shows its work.
Then sit with the trade. About $713,000 comes in as a one-time stipend for our people. Somewhere near $800,000 goes out of the money that runs our schools every year. The stipend is one time. The cut is to the base we count on every August, and we do not get that base back. Franklin's MFP already fell about $820,000 last year on its own, from declining enrollment. This order would take roughly that much again, on purpose.
By the numbers, for Franklin
About the numbers the governor used to sell this.
The order says Louisiana spends about $16,500 per student and calls it a 67 percent increase since 1988, the proof that there is plenty of money if districts would stop wasting it on overhead. I checked that against the Census. Louisiana's actual operating spending is $14,645 per student, below the national average of $16,526. The $16,500 the governor quoted is the national figure, and it counts construction and one-time federal dollars, not the classroom. On the money that runs a classroom, Louisiana ranks 30th in the country. We are not a high-spending state, and we never have been.
The order also makes a claim that undoes itself. It says per-student spending went up while teacher pay, adjusted for inflation, fell below where it was in 1988. Both of those can be true. Together they tell you where the money went, and it was not overhead. It went to retirement, health insurance, special education, and busing. Those are the same "non-instructional" lines this order now wants to cut to pay teachers. You cannot fund a raise by cutting the things the money already pays for.
One more. The order says many districts are sitting on tens of millions in unassigned reserves, and the governor points to over $1 billion in school savings statewide. Some big districts have that cushion. Franklin does not. We carry about $6 million, a 20 percent operating reserve, the rainy-day money every careful district keeps. That is what the state wants us to spend, and it does not stretch as far as Baton Rouge thinks.
Why this lands harder on us than on them.
In a big suburban district, "non-instructional" can mean a layer of administration. In Franklin Parish it means the buses that run the long routes across this parish, the people who keep the buildings open, and the dollars the formula sends because we have more students in poverty and special education than the state average. Look at our own books. Franklin's entire general administration line is about $1.1 million out of a $47 million budget. You cannot pull $800,000 out of a $1.1 million office and call it trimming the top. What this order calls overhead is the bus barn, the light bill, and the aide in a special education classroom. Even the state admits it. Lawmakers say the $1.2 billion pot the cut comes from pays for transportation, construction, and school lunches. That is not overhead. That is school. Those formula weights are not extras. They are the reason the formula works for a parish like ours at all. A cut a wealthy district absorbs at the top, we absorb in the classroom.
The people who run our schools are already saying it. The head of the state superintendents' association says giving a raise while laying people off is difficult, and he wished the governor had asked local superintendents before signing. I wish he had, too. The state's own education chief is telling districts to brace for hard budget decisions, and administrators warn the cut could mean layoffs in small and rural districts, where there is no spare layer to trim.
Where this leaves Franklin.
The state has not said how the $168 million will be split between districts, so no one can put a final number on Franklin's cut yet. Districts build their budgets now, months before the stipend is even paid in December. The dollars most exposed are the ones a rural parish depends on most: the weighted funding for students in poverty and special education, and the money for busing.
This is not a teacher raise. It is the same one-time stipend our teachers and support staff have received for three years, with nothing added to their salaries and no new money behind it. The only thing that changed is who pays for it. For three years the stipend was extra money on top of school budgets. This year it is pulled out of the MFP, the formula that runs our schools. The same dollars still reach our teachers, but Franklin loses about that much from the budget that keeps the buses running and the lights on, and it loses it every year from now on, not once. A one-time check, paid for with a permanent cut. That props up our teachers for a year and wears down our schools for good.