Florida high school coaching pay remains sore subject

If all goes as planned, high school athletic coaches in the School District of Osceola County will soon receive long-awaited supplemental pay increases.

It’s unclear, though, when coaching peers in other Orlando area public school districts may reap a similar benefit.

Football coaches in particular, most of whom work nearly year-round, have been vocal about the need for raises for years. The outcry has grown louder as inflation climbs and colleagues leave Florida for higher-paying jobs that come with fewer responsibilities in neighboring states.

The head football coaching supplement in Osceola County breaks down to roughly $9.43 per hour during a calendar year — give or take. That is based on a minimum of 20 hours per week on top of classroom work from the start of preseason to the end of the regular season, then coaching four weeks in the spring and overseeing summer workouts in June and July.

Aside from teaching responsibilities for most, the workweek additionally includes time spent game-planning for opponents, communicating with media and college coaches, taking players on college trips and monitoring their progress in the classroom.

Osceola County head football coaches currently take home the lowest supplement amount for their sport — at $4,111 per year — compared with others in Orange, Seminole, Lake, Volusia and Brevard counties.

A tentative agreement is in place to bump compensation for 23 athletic supplements in the school district “to address their increased workload and certificates earned,” according to a Sept. 7 letter to Osceola County Education Association members.

Details on potential increases have not been disclosed. The school district and teachers’ union also agreed to form a supplements committee “to address disparities in supplements for arts and academic programs.”

It’s been more than a decade since Osceola County coaches received an increase in supplemental pay. Time will tell if the proposed changes are a short-term solution to an ongoing problem throughout the state or if those raises might help retain coaches for years to come.

The two sides are scheduled to meet again Tuesday.

“Both OCEA and SDOC reaffirmed our commitment to becoming a leading compensation package for educators in Central Florida,” the Osceola County Education Association stated. “Having already secured a 5% cost-of-living adjustment for all employees, this year we aim to address case-specific compensation gaps in order to ensure fair pay in all situations.”

Teachers’ union presidents at area school districts told the Orlando Sentinel this summer that employee salaries, health-care costs and working conditions rank atop the priorities voiced by active members.

While the majority are not in it for the money, coaching high school sports in Florida is financially a losing proposition, coaches say, and even more so when the season extends into the playoffs.

Osceola High’s Eric Pinellas garnered a $250 regional tournament bonus last fall as compensation for an additional four weeks of work while leading the Kowboys to a Florida High School Athletic Association football state semifinal.

Brevard and Lake counties, which had an increase in supplements last year, offer coaches similar bonuses for each round a team advances after districts. Not all districts do.

“When you look at it, it’s a problem across the state, not just in Osceola County,” Pinellas said of compensation. “In this county, they’re fighting just to try to get teacher salary raises.”

Florida ranked No. 48 nationally in average teacher salary ($51,230) during the 2021-22 school year, according to educator pay data compiled by the National Education Association. Teachers in the six-county Orlando area pulled an average salary of $51,000 last year, based on numbers on the Florida Department of Education website.

Head football coaching pay in Orange County averages $4,525 per year on a tiered scale, which varies from $3,795 for those with three years or less of experience to $5,313 for 15 years or more.

As is the case in Osceola, a Seminole County head football coach makes $2 less ($4,184) than high school band directors make at $4,186. Average head football coaching pay via a tiered system in Volusia comes out to $4,813, followed by Lake County at $4,370 and Brevard at $4,209.

Those supplements are typically paid out in two installments as part of a coach’s regular paycheck.

“Florida is the premier state for high school football,” first-year Sanford Seminole coach Karl Calhoun Jr. said. “The fact that we’re getting less than minimum wage for the hours we put in is crazy.”

Like teacher salaries, additional supplemental pay is bargained for between individual school districts and the unions that represent educators.

Janet Moody, who took over as the OCEA president this summer, told the Sentinel that the teachers’ union had tried for two years to get the school district to “have conversations about working on our supplements, which includes sports, academics and the arts.

“We very much support the coaches and recognize that they need to have their supplements increased. And we don’t want to leave out our arts teachers and the people who do a lot with academic programs because there’s also a great contribution there.”

At a standstill

While some progress appears on the horizon in Osceola, issues remain in Orange and Seminole counties, where Ocoee’s Aaron Sheppard and Seminole High’s Eric Lodge parlayed successful seasons on the sideline into much higher-paying positions in Georgia and South Carolina.

Those counties nearly lost others in recent years. Coaching supplements in Orange have not budged in the past two decades while very high health-care costs have cut deeply into the pocketbooks of those in Seminole.

Dr. Phillips’ Rodney Wells, who essentially made the same supplement during a state football championship season in 2017 as he did last year when the Panthers missed the playoffs, said he reluctantly passed over opportunities in Texas and Georgia that came with six-figure salaries.

An Orlando native with strong ties to the area, Wells is one of only 15 coaches at the 50 public high schools in Orange, Seminole, Osceola, Lake and southwest Volusia counties that have at least 10 years of head coaching experience.

Constant turnover is leading to younger and less experienced coaches landing head coaching positions, some of whom do not walk the hallways as educators at their respective schools. A number of part-time coaches have other jobs and do not teach.

“It’s going to take somebody in the teachers’ union who was a former coach to constantly push the issue and get it on the agenda because obviously it’s not,” Wells said of increasing supplements. “That person has to push for everybody to get a raise, for all educators, and then they’ll think about it. That’s just where we are.”

It will be no earlier than next year before the union “could potentially look at supplement adjustments,” according to new Orange County Classroom Teachers Association president Clinton McCracken, who said “raises across the board” are the most pressing issue based on more than 1,000 survey responses from union members.

“This year, we are focusing on increasing salaries for all teachers and improving working conditions with a goal of teacher recruitment and retention,” McCracken said in a July text reply to the Sentinel.

“If I’m an administrator, I sit at the table and say, ‘We need more quality coaches because they set the tone for our kids in school,’” Wells said. “Most principals and assistant principals know the impact a coach has as a mentor on campus.”

Orange County Public Schools balked at a proposal for employee raises of up to $5,350 in August following two months of negotiations. An impasse was declared, and talks have resumed.

Seminole County Public Schools and the Seminole Education Association agreed upon tentative teacher raises that range between $1,230 to $2,110.

Seminole County was granted a 4.09% increase in some supplements last year, which hardly helped with soaring insurance rates estimated by some to be as much as three times as expensive as neighboring Orange County.

Lake Howell football coach Shaun Lorenzano has stayed put for the time being despite the lure of better-paying opportunities in Georgia. He and his wife, Silverhawks girls basketball coach Anna Lorenzano, have experience as public school employees on both sides of the county border.

“If you want to keep coaches down here, you’ve got to make the pay a priority,” said Shaun Lorenzano, who benefited from the years-of-service supplement tier while working at Cypress Creek.

“I took about a $15,000 pay cut to come here when you factor in the supplements and insurance costs. Orange County gets way better deals when bargaining for insurance,” he said.

“It’s another example of why coaches continue to leave the state of Florida,” Calhoun said of insurance coverage. “Until they change it, we’re going to continue to lose great coaches to other states. I don’t think people understand the impact these coaches have on the kids and these programs.”

A new approach

There is no cookie-cutter solution when it comes to increasing pay for high school coaches in a state where 67 school districts go about things in different ways.

Few better understand the challenges when seeking change to the status quo than former DeLand and Gainesville coach James Thomson. He returned to the state early last year to coach at Winter Haven despite “making triple” the salary in Georgia, where the gaudy paychecks come with added pressure to produce wins on the field.

He joined current Florida coaches Rick Darlington (DeLand) and Collin Drafts (Nease) among those who left for out-of-state jobs only to return years later.

Darlington, a three-time state champion at Apopka, left to coach in Georgia and Alabama. Drafts, an assistant at Olympia and West Orange, briefly returned to his home state of South Carolina after being head coach at East River.

Thomson is a Dr. Phillips graduate and teacher of almost 20 years. He helped spearhead the Florida Coaches Coalition movement alongside Dr. Andrew Ramjit when he made his return. That group, aimed at increasing pay for high school coaches, now boasts more than 13,000 members at the high school, middle school and youth levels.

“We’ve been conditioned to look at $5,000 in one county as if it’s significantly more than the $3,000 [supplement] in another county,” Thomson said. “In reality, we need to be looking at the $25,000 or $30,000 that’s offered [for coaching] up in Georgia.

“What they do in Georgia is completely feasible to do here in Florida,” he said.

Georgia coaching supplements, paid by school districts and booster clubs, dwarf those in Florida — and teaching salaries also tend to be higher, according to published reports.

Thomson lasted only one season at Winter Haven, where he turned a 2-8 team into an 8-4 playoff qualifier before taking a scouting position at USF due to the low pay offered in Polk County.

He remains an advocate for Florida high school football coaches.

“We’ve dissected the structure of this thing over and over again. We know exactly how it is,” Thomson said of discussing pay raises with teachers’ unions and school districts. “What you’re going to run into, what we ran into, is that they’re not going to give you a seat at that table.”

The sentiment was echoed by several Orlando area coaches during the offseason, who cited that as a primary reason for not being as engaged with their unions compared with other groups of educators.

“County coaches need to come together as a subcommittee to get that seat and go in there with a plan of what needs to happen,” Thomson said. “Or it’s got to come from politicians at the top, someone who runs on that issue. We’ve got to have enough influence as a collective to help put someone in office that can help spark change.”

Band directors in Seminole County and speech-and-language instructors in Lake County were successful at forming subcommittees that garnered supplement increases in recent years.

One solution often kicked around when it comes to football coaches, who arguably put in the most hours for programs that typically generate the most money for schools, is to make them a 10- or 11-month administrative employee that essentially comes with an increase in pay embedded in their salaries.

But giving substantial pay bumps to a fraction of educators when there remains a need for raises for so many others in this state is much easier said than done at this point.

“Once one metro county restructures how we’re going to do things, whether that’s hourly wages or like they do with salaries in Georgia, I feel the rest of the counties will fall in line and Florida will have the most competitive pay,” Thomson said. “If it changes right there, right away, whoever the best is in coaching will be trying to get the jobs in those counties.”

This article originally appeared on OrlandoSentinel.com. Email J.C. Carnahan at jcarnahan@orlandosentinel.com.