Changes coming to ASPIRE Award program
Teachers getting more in base pay, bonus amounts decreasing
The HISD Board of Education recently voted to continue the district’s ASPIRE Award program, which rewards eligible teachers whose students show academic growth, but there have been a few changes to the incentive funding structure.
The maximum award amounts for the 2015–2016 school year have decreased because the Board of Education shifted money from the ASPIRE Awards to pay for higher teacher salaries. The starting salary for a first-year teacher has risen from $46,805 two years ago to $51,500 for the 2015–2016 school year— a 10 percent jump. Similarly, veteran teachers have also received increases in their salaries.
The new maximum award for teachers in Group 1, which are core teachers in grades 3–11 with EVAAS, is $5,442. All other groups saw a similar decrease (by about 45 percent) in the maximum award.
Another change to the ASPIRE Award program is that HISD will no longer use Norm Referenced Testing (Iowa/Logramos) to measure student achievement, which means one group of teachers will move from Group 1 to Group 3.
Additional information about these changes will be distributed to ASPIRE-eligible teachers in the coming months.The 2015–2016 ASPIRE Awards will be distributed in January 2017.
That is fair enough. Thank you. How about LEP students who took STAAR in Spanish the previous year and last year they took it in English? Is there an adjustment provided or consideration for this scenario? Thank you for your response.
Yes, there are adjustments made to ensure that teachers are not disadvantaged if they have students who transitioned from Spanish to English. There is a pdf document posted on the ASPIRE portal that explains the adjustments and it can be found here:
http://static.battelleforkids.org/Documents/HISD/HISD_Adjusting_for_Spanish_to_English_Transition_Teachers.pdf
Teachers have to log on to the ASPIRE portal to get to this link.