The Lindbergh Board of Education voted 5-2 last week to correct an error in 2014-2015 salary increases for two employee groups.

Voting to correct the error were board President Kathleen Kienstra, board Vice President Don Bee, Secretary Karen Schuster, board member Gary Ujka and board member Vicki Lorenz Englund. Opposed were board Treasurer Kara Gotsch and board member Kate Holloway.

After July paychecks were issued, a mistake was discovered in pay rates for administrators and Early Childhood Education staff, according to Chief Financial Officer Charles Triplett. Those two groups should have received increases totaling 5.3 percent — the average raise for district employees for the 2014-2015 school year, he said.

Gotsch requested that action on the pay correction be postponed until the issue could be discussed during a board workshop, noting that all previous documentation presented to the board had indicated employees would receive a 3.3-percent pay increase.

Though the board voted Aug. 11 to approve the pay correction, a workshop to discuss the 2014-2015 salary package will take place at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 19, at the district Administration Building, 4900 S. Lindbergh Blvd.

The Lindbergh Board of Education was scheduled to consider taking action earlier this week to correct an error in salary increases for two employee groups.

The school board was set to meet Monday night — after the Call went to press.

After July paychecks were issued, a mistake was discovered in pay rates for administrators and Early Childhood Education staff, according to Chief Financial Officer Charles Triplett.

Those two groups should have received increases totaling 5.3 percent — the average raise for district employees for the 2014-2015 school year, he said.

Instead those employees received a 3.3-percent increase in their salaries. The impact of the proposed pay adjustment on the district’s 2014-2015 budget totals roughly $90,564, which also includes associated benefits, Triplett told the Call.

While the approved budget projected a surplus of $77,028, he emphasized he is proposing to maintain a balanced budget by using the projected surplus, plus transferring additional funds from existing business services accounts when the board adopts a revised 2014-2015 budget in December.

“… So we will still have a balanced budget. There’s no dipping into reserves,” he said. “No programs are affected by this. No employees are being laid off. It’s not a crisis in that sense. It’s just an error on my part for not getting it right the first time.”

A relatively small number of people were impacted, as salaries for teachers and classified employees were correct, Triplett said.

He outlined how the error transpired, noting that negotiations began with employee groups shortly after the passage of the district’s Proposition G — for Growth — bond issue in April.

Lindbergh was “very fortunate” that the Gravois Bluffs tax-increment financing district, or TIF, was dissolved last September, resulting in additional commercial-tax revenue for the district of $2.2 million, according to the chief financial officer.

“So we had additional revenue that wasn’t from the homeowners, and it wasn’t money that was going to make us go out and ask for more,” he said. “It was money that was coming to us after years of not getting it. So we looked at that as a way to give some raises larger than we’ve done in the three to four years previous. Things have been very tight.”

The teachers’ salary schedule is comprised of channels and steps. Channels denote a teacher’s level of education. Each channel also includes steps that represent each year a teacher has worked.

“When we negotiate with them (teachers), we’re not talking about individual steps. We really talk about the pool of money that goes into the salaries. So we talked to them about what’s the additional amount of money we could add to the pool because we’d like to try to catch up with our neighboring districts,” he said, adding the district has fallen behind in salaries compared to its benchmark districts.

“So in my head, my approach to it was what will be the additional cost to the district, budgetwise, to try to give raises to employees,” Triplett said, adding that he also factors into the salary pool funds from the retirement of teachers at the higher end of the salary schedule who are replaced by new teachers who make less money.

“So we kind of came at it from two ways. We had a salary budget from last year that we knew we’d have some savings in it (from retirements), but we wanted to keep it in the pool of available monies, and then what’s the additional money from Gravois Bluffs could we add to that.”

During a board budget workshop in May, Triplett noted he discussed a 3.3-percent salary increase for employees.

“What I didn’t talk about, I wasn’t clear about and should have been, was what was left within the pool — the existing dollars that we were going to add to that — that made the average salary increase 5.3 percent. And, of course, almost nobody gets the average — that’s just the average. It was another 2 percent was available. So 5.3 percent was the average raise …”

For teachers, depending on their place on the salary schedule, raises for the 2014-2015 school year ran the gamut from less than 1 percent to 6 percent to 7 percent, with a small number receiving 12 percent, according to Triplett.

But when he calculated salaries for administrators, he used the 3.3-percent number, and he gave the same percentage to ECE Director Charlene Ziegler.

As a result, when the July paychecks were issued to employees, they contained the incorrect salary increase for administration and ECE staff.

Such an error will not occur in the future, Triplett said, adding more people will be involved in the process moving forward.

“In hindsight, obviously, there’s been lots of discussion about this internally — a lot of thinking on my part. We’ve identified where I made the mistake, as I was just trying to do too much on my own,” he said. “I didn’t have a second and third set of eyes go through it with me …

“In the future, it won’t happen again because we will have the director of accounting, Kathy Wood, and Brian McKenney, who’s the assistant sup (superintendent) for HR (human resources), and I will vet everything on that so we don’t have that kind of slip-up.”