School Board OKs Raises for Teachers, Staff

School trustees Wednesday unanimously voted to hand pay raises to more than 1,500 teachers and other employees in a push to make salaries more competitive with those in neighboring districts.

Citing past years when district employees received small pay raises or none at all, Ventura Unified School District board members gave 8% raises to their nearly 800 teachers while boosting the minimum pay for entry-level educators to $30,000 a year. The pay increases are retroactive to July 1.

In addition, board members gave a 7.5% increase to about 750 nonteaching employees and managers, also retroactive to July 1.

The raises were worked out during months of negotiations between administrators and union representatives, and they come at a time when the competition to lure and retain teachers is at an all-time high.

Efforts to keep pace with a statewide class-size reduction program have resulted in more job openings than qualified educators.

“We’ve always tried to put salaries as our highest priority,” said trustee Velma Lomax. “We truly appreciate our employees. And it takes all of us as a team to make it work.”

A survey of 18 school districts in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties ranked Ventura second from the bottom in salary.

In fact, average salaries in the Ventura district lagged 14% behind average pay in the Oxnard high school district and 9.2% below what teachers are earning on average in Thousand Oaks.

As a result, some of Ventura’s best teachers have been lured away by other districts, officials said, and administrators have had some difficulty finding enough new teachers to fill those slots.