BY JOSEPH B. NADEAU

WOONSOCKET — Local teacher pay is going up at a contracted increase of 4 percent this year and outgoing Schools Superintendent Maureen Macera has recommended that the School Committee award the same raise to department directors and principals.

The School Committee will take up the proposed pay increase for non-union administrative positions when the panel meets Wednesday at the Woonsocket Area Career and Technical media center.
Macera pointed to the proposal as one of fairness, given that teachers are already slated to receive the 4-percent pay increase under the final year of their three-year contract with the department.
Macera had proposed a change or deferment of the teacher increase in talks with the Woonsocket Teacher Guild, but has already been informed by Richard DiPardo, Guild president, his group decided against that move.
As a result, Macera said the administrators should be given the same raise in recognition of the extra time and effort they have put in as part of their supervisory duties and for program improvements required by the state and federal governments.
“If the teachers get 4 percent, I have to ask for 4 percent for my administrative team, otherwise the pay gap between them gets smaller,” she said. “I can’t do that to my administrative staff,” she said.
The high school’s success in meeting the state’s new performance-based graduation requirements is just one example of many steps the administrators have taken to set the department on the right path to improvement, she noted.
The teacher increase this year is based on the cost-of-living increase in place when the contract was negotiated three years ago and follows two lower increases of about 3 percent per year in the first and second years of the pact, Macera said.
While hoping to convince teachers to defer some of that pay increase given the tight fiscal constraints the department faced in setting its new $63 million budget, Macera said she also understood the teachers’ concern that their raise could be a needed hedge against the higher living costs in the current economy.
Teachers may also be facing significant challenges in their next round of contract talks under what could continue to be an uncertain climate for school funding, according to Macera.
To give the same raise to the department’s administrators will cost about $30,000 and Macera said she will present the details of her plan to cover that amount in the current budget at the Committee’s meeting on Wednesday.
Although she couldn’t say if the plan will gain the committee’s support, Macera said not giving the administrators an adequate raise could cost the department more in the long run.
Other communities in the area could be very interested in hiring administrators that have driven the improvements already in place in the district and losing those staff members could hinder the department’s bid to continue that work, according to Macera.
“They have delivered, and it would not be fair to my administrators to receive less of an increase than the staff they supervise considering the time that they put in,” she said.
Macera herself has officially retired from the department as of this week, but is continuing to work on the remaining budget matters on a per diem basis, three day a week, until the newly appointed superintendent, Robert J. Gerardi Jr., takes over on Aug. 14. Gerardi is currently completing his contractual obligations at his North Providence school post.