To all P.A.C. members:
There will be a Teacher's pay School board meeting on September 28th, 1999 at 5pm. Please make every effort to attend and voice your concern over this inadequate and demoralizing pay "raise" the board has offered Our teachers deserve better then this treatment the board is offering. We have some really good teachers and we ARE going to lose them to the other counties if we don't start paying them! How can we ever hope to compete with the other counties in regards to keeping and recruiting qualified teachers if their pay is so low? Did you know that a board member makes more than a starting teacher in this county? Board members are paid $30,000 per year, staring teachers are paid $24,000 per year. Our teachers are paid 54th out of 66 districts in this state! Our board is 7th! Furthermore, the average teacher pay actually dropped 2.29% in Polk County for the 98/99 school year - the largest drop for any district in the state. Only eight other districts had a decrease in their average teacher pay (none as large as Polk's drop). The remaining 58 districts managed to increase average teacher pay. See the report on Teacher Pay Rankings for Polk County for more details.
There are a lot of issues that P.A.C. is and will be addressing now and in the future. This is one of them. We ask your help in this area. It doesn't matter what side of the uniform issue you sided with. We are all united on getting and recruiting quality teachers for our children's future! So, please help us help your children! Come to the meeting and speak your 3 minutes worth!
The meeting will start at 5:00 on Tuesday, Sept. 28th (rescheduled to this date because of Hurricane Floyd and Tropical Storm Harvey) at the School Board auditorium at the District Main Office at 1915 S. Floral Ave. in Bartow. Here is an interactive map and driving directions to the School Board auditorium. The offices are marked as a red star on the map. If you can't be there right at 5:00, don't worry - this meeting should go on for a while. If you want to sign up as a scheduled speaker, or need better directions to the auditorium, call the Superintendent's Office at (941) 534-0521
Thank you for your help and support!
Chris Hughes P.A.C. Member August 30th, 1999