Denver’s elected school board this week resurrected a proposal to nearly quadruple how much money its members can earn for performing official duties, a move that would raise their annual salary cap to $33,000.
Denver Public Schools’ Board of Education considered raising members’ compensation, currently capped at $9,000 a year, in February but ultimately tabled the discussion.
Now, the board is expected to vote on the revived proposal on Nov. 16, which is after next week’s school board election but before any new members would be sworn in.
“We know that having the amount of time that all of us spend as school board members is expensive,” board Treasurer Scott Esserman, who is sponsoring the resolution, said during a meeting Thursday. He called being a school board director a full-time job.
There are three seats open this election and at least one new director will join the board after Vice President Auon’tai Anderson announced he would not seek re-election. Incumbents Scott Baldermann and Charmaine Lindsay are seeking to hold onto their seats.
Traditionally, elected school board positions have been voluntary in Colorado. But in 2021, state legislators passed a law allowing such compensation. DPS was one of the first districts to pay directors, which it began doing earlier this year.
Under the proposal being considered by the DPS board, members could be paid $150 per day for up to five days a week for performing official board duties — the maximum allowed under the 2021 state law.
Baldermann was the only board member at Thursday’s meeting to say he opposed the pay increase. He said he believes it shouldn’t happen before the board takes a closer look at its members’ spending. Baldermann previously has said the board needs to create a policy governing what DPS will reimburse board members for and that the board also should vote when members’ total expenses exceed the traditional $5,000 limit — an issue that came up amid the disclosure that directors spent more than $40,000 traveling to conferences in the past year.
An increase in compensation cannot happen during a member’s term, according to state law. That means only the three members elected or re-elected next week would qualify for the new pay rate, while those eligible now would keep getting paid at the current rate.
Five of the seven DPS board members currently are eligible for compensation, including Esserman, Lindsay, Carrie Olson, Michelle Quattlebaum and President Xóchitl “Sochi” Gaytán.
But only three board members were paid in the last fiscal year, according to district records. Esserman and Quattlebaum were paid more than $13,000 each, which is a combination of pay and public employee retirement benefits. Gaytán received more than $12,000 in pay and benefits. (Board members must request to be compensated and are not automatically paid.)
DPS school board members previously have said that paying directors allows people who may not have been able to run for office in the past to do so by breaking down financial barriers.
School boards, they said, also are facing more public scrutiny since the COVID-19 pandemic and have a lot of power over the lives of students and district employees when it comes to making decisions about how to allocate resources and close schools.
“It’s definitely a problem that we don’t attract people to do this job because it doesn’t pay,” Lindsay said during Thursday’s meeting.
It’s unclear how many school districts in Colorado pay their board directors; neither the state Department of Education nor the Colorado Association of School Boards tracks such information.
The Sheridan School District in Englewood was one of the first to vote to approve board compensation, and, in 2022, paid five members a total of $1,650. The school board overseeing Aurora Public Schools voted to pay members up to $450 a month, but that won’t go into effect until July 2025.
Chalkbeat Colorado’s Melanie Asmar contributed to this report.
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