The District 200 Board of Education voted unanimously at a special board meeting, June 16, to approve a new merit-based compensation system for nonunion employees, such as the superintendent and administrators. The board anticipates the system to be phased-in over the next two years.
Last year, the board authorized the Hay Group, an international management consulting firm based in Philadelphia, to conduct a market analysis and create a strategy for compensating the district’s nonunion employees.
Two representatives from the firm led interviews and focus groups with a range of board members, administrators, faculty members and nonunion support services employees. The firm found that although the district’s compensation and benefits program was competitive, nonunion employees had a series of complaints about it.
Among the firm’s findings was a “lack of communication and clarity around compensation and benefits,” “inconsistent perceptions as to how the compensation program works,” and “confusion as to existence of certain benefits [e.g., tuition reimbursement].” The firm also noted that the “most recent compensation and benefit program summary” for the district was over a decade old.
According to minutes from the board’s Nov. 20, 2014 meeting at which the Hay Group’s findings were presented, then-board president John Phelan felt the firm’s analysis and recommendations “could be of tremendous value to the district by just separating out the positions, defining the roles, and people knowing their responsibilities.”
“The initial phase of the work has been focused on creating a base-pay framework that is competitive with the market,” according to a June 17 statement released by the district regarding the new compensation system.
The Hay Group compared the district’s administrative salaries to the salaries of similar positions within in its own database and within a salary survey of the Northwest Personnel Association (NWPA), a 20-member group of suburban high school districts that includes Oak Park and River Forest High School, Downers Grove Community High School, Proviso Township High Schools and Leyden Community High School.
“The overall goal is for base salaries to fall around the middle of the appropriate range, between the 50th and 60th percentiles of the comparative data,” according to the D200 statement.
“Under the plan approved by the board, employees falling below the range identified for their position will have their base salary brought up to the minimum of the range over the course of two years. The nonaffiliated staff members whose base salary falls within range will receive percentage increases to their base pay, varying from 3.10 [percent] for those at the low end of their ranges to 0.50 [percent] for those at the high end.”
Currently, the system doesn’t include any factors on which to judge administrative performance. Those are expected to be identified over the course of the 2015-16 school year. The district anticipates that the merit-base salary increases will be ready for implementation in the 2016-17 school year. Ultimately, according to its 2014 power point presentation, the Hay Group wants to “build out/refine compensation philosophy for” the district’s union employees.
Former board member Sharon Patchak-Layman, whose tenure ended this year, explained the reasoning for the board’s insistence, at the time, to move to merit-based pay.
“They wanted to get away from every year, everybody gets a 2 percent raise,” she said in a recent interview. “In the past, it was one for all and all for one. If they were giving a cost-of-living increase to employees, they gave it to all employees. I think the question was, ‘If you do give cost-of-living increases, do you give anything in addition to that and would that then be your merit?'”
She said if the district does decide to extend merit pay to its union employees, the new compensation system would need to be part of the bargaining contract. But the board has been mulling switching to a different model for some time, she said.
“There’s been conversations about merit pay for a couple of years,” Patchak-Layman said. “There was interest among some board members as to why salaries would go up or not go up and what would be the basis for it. It was always hard for me to give raises because I thought our salaries were high already.”