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PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT

School leaders today face a paralyzing paradox: a five-alarm war for professional talent that demands professional wages pitted against a narrative of scarcity that suggests the only solutions are painful cuts or tax hikes.

In the South Bend Community School Corporation in Indiana, we showed this to be a false choice. Despite being a top-tier district by size, our teacher pay ranked in the bottom third of the state. We could not compete. Yet, in a single budget cycle, we vaulted into the top 10, becoming the highest-paying district in our region.

We achieved a $9,000 flat raise for teachers (a 13 percent average increase) and a 20 percent hike for support staff. Crucially, we did this without a tax referendum while our general budget grew by only a standard 3 percent inflationary adjustment.

We accomplished this in 2025-26 by shifting our finance department from a passive scorekeeper to a proactive strategist. We operated on the belief that the money to value our people already was there, trapped in operational waste.