Retirement incentive set to lure teachers.

Many students were shocked when they came back to school this year and found nine new teachers.  Some of these new positions were due to retirements, and others because the school is offering some new classes and needed teachers for those spots.  With so many new teachers, it seems as if the school will not need to hire any more for at least a couple of years.  That is, if it weren’t for the retirement incentive.

The retirement incentive is a plan that was proposed by last year’s negotiators of the teachers’ contract, which included Superintendent Dr. Rocky Killion, Chief Negotiator Mr. Warner, and members of the School Board.  After the plan was proposed, both the administrators of all three schools and the West Lafayette Education Association, which consists of the majority of teachers in the corporation, voted and put the plan into effect.  Specifically, the plan consists of bonuses for 13 teachers who have chosen to retire either this year or next.

Why was this plan constructed?  “Teachers that have been here the longest have the highest salaries,” says Mr. Shriner. “Since salary is partly based on years of experience, if people at the top of the pay scale retire, it will enable the school to hire teachers with less experience and allow the school to save money in order to be able to hire more teachers and fund other projects.”

Both Mr. Shriner and Mr. Pugh, teacher and co-president of the WLEA, commented that it will be sad to see teachers who have been here for many decades go.  “When you think about it, added together, all those teachers have hundreds of years of experience,” said Mr. Pugh.  However, though a loss of experienced teachers seems problematic, Mr. Pugh also stated that “there’s a perceived trade-off between energy and new ideas, and experience and knowledge.  What we lose in one we gain in the other.”  Mr. Shriner also promised that though the school will lose some established teachers, “we will continue to keep the school’s tradition of excellence in academics.”

The incentive will also allow teachers to retire earlier than they would have planned.  Though retirement is possible as soon as the sum of a teacher’s years of experience and their age reaches 85, most teachers choose to stay on, as Social Security and Medicare are not available until reaching 65 years of age.  With the incentive, however, teachers will be able to cover some of these costs, giving them “the chance they deserve,” Mr. Shriner says, “to enjoy life.”

This is not the only way the school corporation is saving money to stay within the ever-shrinking budget.  Department budgets are being cut, as well as the corporation’s contribution to health insurance costs.  Everyone in the corporation has been making sacrifices, because, as Mr. Pugh said, “We don’t want to see the corporation in financial difficulty.  Hopefully the retirement incentive will be a win-win situation.”