Civil Municipal Magazine - Nov 2023

245 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 4, ISSUE 11 THE WEST OT TAWA SCHOOL DISTRICT recognize many millions of dollars of savings for our community through the foresight of our business office and our partnership with Huntington. We were able to refinance our debt structure to ensure the financial stability of the district. We have a healthy fund equity, we have a healthy budget, and I think we’re investing in the right things.” “We work closely with Holland Township and Park Township, both on the recreation side and the management side; it’s a critical part of our commitment to the community. We share space with them; we work with them closely; we share the same interests; they work with our students; they have been amazing. A lot of districts are at odds with their municipalities – we have great relationships with ours.” Getting the best teachers Of course, at the center of any great educational institution are its teachers, and Bearden notes that this past academic year, the district was the leader in the state of Michigan in teacher compensation. “We reworked our entire teacher compensation contract because we felt that our teachers weren’t compensated at the level that we wanted them to be – particularly younger teachers in the first ten years of their careers,” he relays. “So, we embarked on what we call our 50K Project. A lot of our teachers come from Hope College here in town and that costs about $50,000 a year for tuition, room, and board. So, we said ‘What if we use that as a baseline – the minimum we would pay any of our professional staff? And could we filter that across our pay scale?’ We were paying our first-year teachers about $42,000, which was near the bottom of Ottawa County, but we were paying teachers at the top of our pay scale near the top of the pay scale, the second most in Ottawa County. So our issue was: can we pay a competitive wage to our teachers at the lower end of the pay scale who are new in their careers so that we can recruit and retain the best possible people for our students? And, we did. We approached our union, we worked with them hand-in-hand, and we successfully raised