Statewide, median teacher salary increased by about 10 percent between the fiscal years 2008-2009 and 2012-2013, according to a new report from the Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative government finance watchdog.

Those increases, the report notes, were driven largely by the so-called “step” raises that occur in tandem with teacher seniority.

The report also shows that while the number of teachers and other staff in schools has decreased by 25,350 positions since 2008-2009, that decrease has also occurred in tandem with an enrollment decline of about 76,000.

That increase in median pay comes at a time when most districts have been fiscally strapped and faced rising costs across the board. A cost of living increase alone for the same time period would have totaled about 6.6 percent.

But a snapshot of teachers’ median salaries presents a limited view of the complicated issue of district finances and teacher pay.

For example, the report shows that East Greenbush Central School District teachers’ median salary rose from $57,520 to $65,545 between 2008-2009 and 2012-2013, an increase slightly higher than the state average at 12 percent.

There, Superintendent Angela Nagle, points out that teachers also took on a larger portion of health insurance costs to help balance the district budget.

“The Empire Center’s report doesn’t take into full account the number of cost-saving measures districts like East Greenbush have taken in recent years,” Nagle said.

Several local districts also pointed to a loss primarily of newer teachers, which drove up the median increase in salary, though the Empire Center found overall that most positions were lost to attrition rather than layoffs.

“When staff reductions occur they are almost universally determined by seniority within a tenure area,” said Michael Mugits, superintendent of the 320-student Green Island Union Free School District, where median salary climbed by only 5 percent to just over $45,000 a year. “This results in the least experienced, and often the lowest paid, employees being eliminated from the payroll.”

The report also shows a sharp difference in the number of non-teaching professionals in schools compared to teachers. In upstate New York, since 2000-2001, the number of teachers has declined by nearly 10 percent, while the number of non-teaching professions has increased by about 11 percent.

Lori Caplan, superintendent of Watervliet City School District, said that many schools have had to up numbers of support staff to meet new requirements over the past 15 years, such as adding teaching assistants to classrooms with special needs students. (Watervliet, since 2008, has lost a total of 31 staff positions in its 1,500-student district.)

In Watervliet, like many districts, the median salary says most about the experience level of its teachers. There, the starting salary is about $40,000, and teachers with more than 25 years’ experience earn about $85,000. But the vast majority of the district’s teachers fall somewhere in the middle, earning about $54,000. Its median salary is about $52,000. And that number has risen markedly — by nearly 20 percent from 2008-2009 to 20012-2013 — as larger numbers of young teachers have decided to stay on rather than moving to larger districts, Caplan said.

Tim Hoefer, executive director of the Empire Center, said the real value of the report is to raise a question.

“The very first thing we have to look at here,” he said, “is what is the proper spending per pupil, class size ratio and ratio of teachers to non-teaching professionals?”

The data do not reveal an immediate answer, he said, but it does suggest a starting point for a discussion.

© 2014, Albany Times Union