The Wittenberg-Birnamwood School Board unanimously approved upping daily pay for substitute teachers June 23.
The current pay scale for substitute teachers is $120 per day, with the pay jumping to $130 per day if a sub has worked more than 50 non-consecutive days in the district. Long-term substitutes, filling in for vacant posts, maternity leave and long-term illnesses, get paid $190 per day.
Superintendent Garrett Rogowski proposed increasing pay by $10 each day, which means regular subs would get $130 per day, regardless of how many days worked, and long-term subs would be paid $200 per day. Doing that would put the district second out of nearly 20 districts in the central Wisconsin area polled to determine what would be a fair pay increase.
“I think this is very acceptable,” Rogowski said.
Substitutes for other jobs like teacher aides will not be affected by the change. Aide subs are currently making $16.44 per hour, which Rogowski mentioned had been as much and sometimes more than substitute teachers were making in a day.
“We are suggesting that we freeze that at the 2024-25 rate, because the reason that we’re literally at the top of the region is because every year that scale changes,” Rogowski said. “We’ll adjust as we need to, but right now out of the 20 school districts we polled, we’re the second highest.”
Rogowski noted there are only a handful of substitute teachers who work more than 50 days each year in the district, so keeping the pay the same for all, regardless of how many days are worked, seems fair for the time being. He said the district could see more long-term subs filling in as several teachers are expecting children in the coming school year.
In the future, the district could examine whether to offer a higher pay rate to teachers who have retired from the profession but would be interested in subbing, according to Rogowski.
“I don’t see (other) districts employing that,” he said. “What a couple of them are doing is saying, if you have a teaching license, and if you’ve never taught in the district or you’re a retired teacher who is moving to the area and has a teaching license, you get a higher rate. I think that’s a better strategy than just saying you’re a retired teacher from our district. We’ve had some people who weren’t teachers in our district who are amazing subs.”
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