Two public school teachers recently coauthored a Detroit News op-ed calling for more money for their school districts and higher pay for educators. Fraser Public Schools elementary teacher Jarod McGuffey and Farmington Public Schools high school teacher Kathryn Gustafson claimed in the piece that public schools are underfunded and teacher “compensation packages and salaries are no longer competitive.”

A review of each teacher’s particular pay history offers insights into their claims.

Gustafson began working at Farmington Public Schools in 1996. During her time there, she has been recognized several times as a teacher of the year. Like most experienced teachers, Gustafson has reached the top of her district’s union-negotiated pay scale. Salaries top out in an employee’s 15th year in Farmington, landing in a range of $83,729 to $100,172, depending on the number of academic credentials an individual has accrued.

Though Gustafson was recognized as an outstanding teacher, her base salary would not have increased over the past three years, due to the district’s union contract.

Teachers who have topped out on the union pay scale can only look for higher pay when the district contract they work under expires and is replaced by a new one, which might include an across-the-board increase.

In 2007, for example, a Farmington teacher with a master’s degree and 10 years of experience would have been collecting the top-of-the-scale pay of $83,417. A dozen years later, at least one new contract had been negotiated, along with a number of contract modifications. Those changes meant that in 2019, this topped-out teacher, now with 22 years of experience, was collecting $97,497 a year.

Gustafson’s total salary has increased from $90,903 in 2013-14 to $96,424 in 2017-18, income that includes extra money for taking on additional responsibilities. The average teacher salary in Michigan was $61,908 in 2017-18. The average salary for a Farmington teacher that year was $77,582.

During her tenure, Gustafson would have experienced Michigan’s Lost Decade of the 2000s and the nation’s Great Recession of 2007-2009. In that time, the entire state, including school districts, experienced severe economic stress. In both 2008-09 and 2009-10, state funding for K-12 schools declined, and districts have undergone a difficult recovery from those hard times.

In 1999-2000, Farmington Public Schools received $8,367 in per-pupil funding from the state, after adjusting for inflation. (That year is the earliest one for which online records are available.) In 2018-19, it received $8,144 per pupil. So, it received about $223 less in per-pupil funding than 19 years earlier in real terms, even as state funding for K-12 schools has increased every year since 2011-12. These figures are for state funding only and do not include additional money schools get from the federal government.

This experience has had an impact on the pay prospects of school employees, which may be a factor in the six-year pay history of Gustafson’s co-author, Fraser Public Schools teacher Jarod McGuffey.

McGuffey spent several years in the private sector before becoming a teacher at Fraser Public Schools in January 2013. During his first full year as a teacher, in 2013-14, he earned $45,502. After four years on the job, his pay had risen to $50,818. Those figures include extra money earned for performing additional duties, which still leaves his pay $11,090 below the statewide average of $61,908 for public school teachers. The average salary at Fraser Public Schools is $66,105.

In 2012-13 Fraser Public Schools received per-pupil state funding equal to $8,347 when adjusted for inflation. That increased to $9,132 per pupil in 2018-19, or $785 per pupil more than six years earlier when adjusted for inflation.

The Detroit Police Department said it has started an investigation into a police officer who reported having 2,617.2 hours of overtime in fiscal year 2018. That much overtime, as revealed in city records, translates into an average of 90.3 hours worked every week of the year, and it includes overtime and regular shifts.

To accrue 2,617 hours of overtime, an employee would have to put in 7.16 hours of overtime a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

Those hours boosted this one officer’s annual pay by $100,737 in 2018. Altogether, he collected $159,387 from the city that year.

“We have some concern, and we’ve launched an internal investigation to look more into this matter,” said Detroit Police Department Sgt. Nicole Kirkwood in an email to Michigan Capitol Confidential. “We take misusage of overtime very seriously and if we determine during the course of our investigation that a violation has occurred, then we will take appropriate actions.”

The Detroit police department listed in an email the different categories of overtime used by the officer who claimed 2,614 hours. The analysis was from July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2018.

His 2,614 hours included 1,912 hours of regular overtime pay for putting in hours beyond regular shifts. The officer also claimed 242 hours of overtime for taking care of a police dog in his own home. The officer also claimed 66 overtime hours when he was recalled to duty and another 696 hours of overtime for being on standby.

Six Detroit police employees claimed more than 2,000 hours of overtime last year. A police lieutenant claimed 2,008.1 hours of overtime, for which he received $117,451, boosting his total salary, not counting fringe benefits, to $202,163.

Not all these employees took their overtime compensation in extra cash. Many Michigan police departments allow officers to save, or bank, their overtime credits and use them later to take extra time off. Some departments let officers accrue their banked time for years until they use it to retire early or collect a big final paycheck upon retirement. Some departments also cap the amount of banked time an employee can accrue.

A Detroit police corporal claimed 2,471 overtime hours for which he collected $32,150. It is very likely that he banked some overtime credits. This individual’s total salary for the year was $94,542, not counting fringe benefits. To earn 2,471 hours of overtime, that employee would have had to work 87 hours a week, 52 weeks a year.

Overall, Detroit Police employees claimed 973,227 hours of overtime in 2018, for which they collected $38.3 million. That number does not include the value of banked time. The city of Detroit reported having 2,965 full-time positions in the police department in 2018, and the figures in this article came from the city’s response to an open records law request.