Been married to a teacher for 20 years. There was one year that she did not receive her contracted raise. IPS is the gold standard for what NOT to do for schools and has been for 30+ years. Cross the county line in any direction and the pay and benefits get infinitely better.Actually, having been a teacher, an annual pay raise is not guaranteed and, when I taught in Indianapolis Public Schools back in the late '90's, the Superintendent there implemented a program whereby teachers were going to be held accountable for student attendance (teachers would be required to know where an absent student was by the end of first period AND make every effort to get that student to school for that school day...and there was absolutely no way I was going to go out and pick up absent students and have them in my personal vehicle, ever) and any pay raise was going to be reflective of, or based on, student performance, which meant that a student could refuse to do his/her homework and it would have a direct effect on my pay.
And health-care benefits are voted on by the board for each school system...and the amount of money the system is willing to spend on health insurance is reflected in the budget with regards to other school programs that the budget has to cover.
Also, I didn't have a choice on how much the state 'required' from my employee salary to be put in the state required retirement program.
The wife took a pay cut to change schools. A pretty significant one at that. But she once again has support, appreciation from the admin staff and is happy about being able to help special needs kids like she wants to. She’s been in sped for her entire teaching career and if there was ever an example of why legislators should not be involved in schools sped is it. They’ve ****ed the larger schools all to hell.