School surveys of faculty and staff generally reveal that they value most highly their health, retirement, and tuition reduction/remission benefits and in the overseas and boarding context, housing.

Staff sometimes cannot accurately explain the sick leave/personal leave/ PTO policies, and certainly they tend to know little or nothing about short-term disability insurance and long-term disability insurance as well as long term care insurance They very often find the various medical plans confusing.  They do know when they have a “wellness” bonus, store-sponsored discounts, or free child care.

Schools should be conscious of three core messages about the benefits that they offer (or do not offer):

1. Do the employees even know what their benefits are and their annual dollar value? According to this Consultant’s experience with thousands of clients on this topic, most faculty and staff cannot articulate their benefits package. This is crucial information for all employees to have, and it also serves as a PR tool to attract and retain them.  Not all schools explain the various benefit plans and other “perks” succinctly and clearly. This Consultant is often given a 45-page manual of benefits. No teacher or employee is going to read this in its entirety and understand it.
2. Buy up plans: Plans that allow the employees to buy more life insurance, more retirement insurance, dental and vision coverage, and a range of other options which can be purchased through the school, but much less expensively, than on one’s own. Schools do not sell these ideas, nor do they promote PD monies for advanced degrees, help with paying down college debt, etc.
3. Benefits that seem fair to all employees at all stages of their lives. Some schools clearly provide more to those who have children in the school. That means that the older staff with grown children, singles, and those married with no children receive a relatively small part of the benefit pie. There is nothing wrong with this apparent discrimination in benefits AS LONG AS it is purposeful and not discriminatory by accident and AS LONG AS there are other benefits that are attractive to everyone.

We have worked on the analysis of salary, benefits, and evaluation systems with over 3200 schools for over 40 years. Lately, we have been hearing more and more, less subtle, and more vocal disgruntlement from single employees or those without school-age children who are complaining about a “paltry” base wage increase or a plan that is expensive for them. They note that the board responds, “We cannot afford more this year”, or “Our benefits costs are rising.” This is mostly true, but it does not make those employees feel better.

However, these employees can do math. Let’s use the following example and assume that we are talking about two co-workers who have similar skill sets and experience. If one is single and co-teaching with a person whose spouse and children are on the school’s medical plan where 100% of the individual and 75% of the family coverage is paid for by the school, one can figure out easily the tax-free income differential between the single and the married with a family person.

If that same co-worker has two children in the school at 75% remission, which is also tax free, and the tuition is $25,000, for example, that could be equivalent to $38,000 of additional tax-free benefits. If that teacher is grandfathered into an old system of 100% remission and had or has four children attend with no limit on the number of children, then the income differential is HUGE. For these two co-teachers this could amount to as much as a $100,000 to $200,000 differential annually in the medical and tuition remission benefits alone.

Historically, single teachers or married ones with no children or no school-age children did not complain publicly because they did not want to offend their peers. However, they would vent to me one-on-one as a Consultant interviewing them while working with the school on the assignment.

However, today these teachers are much more frequently asking this Consultant, as well as senior management, “Where is the equivalent benefit for those of us with no children or spouses”? It is a fair question, and no head whom I ever met had an answer.

There is no “equivalent” benefit given the dollars we are talking about. However, IF there is a clear, stated upfront philosophy of compensation based upon the school’s mission statement, then at least there are no surprises. Nevertheless, these teachers may still feel that the benefits system is stacked against them.

What to do? There ARE options to do something to even out these apparently unfair benefits.  Here are some:

1. Forgiving student loan debt with appropriate conditions such as requiring a teacher to stay beyond a certain number of years.
2. Creating a benefit bank for all employees where the same sum is deposited for all. Each employee can use the funds as they most need them either as additional taxable income or as additional non-sheltered higher life insurance, retirement etc.
3. Providing PD and support for graduate work, seminars, conferences, sabbaticals, etc. that might have a special focus on the long-serving, highly committed teacher who has no family medical coverage and never used tuition remission or focused on the younger rising teachers who often volunteer more of their time for appropriate activities without pay.
4. Exploring flexible work schedules.
5. Offering a variety of wellness programs including mental health resources and fitness club memberships.
6. Offering financial planning assistance. In this Consultant’s experience, most teachers are not building a retirement asset and are generally not astute managers of their personal finances.
7. Providing childcare assistance onsite or offering a discount at offsite daycare facilities.
8. Developing employee recognition programs for which all faculty and staff are eligible.

Obviously, it is not possible or affordable for schools to provide all these benefits, but schools need to think much more creatively about them because teachers are either not entering or leaving the profession. We need teachers in all stages of their careers without regard to their status in life, and we need to provide them with a fair compensation and benefits package that gives them the incentive to come and stay.