You need to man up and ask for a fair salary. They are taking advantage of you. If this organization is a non profit and you need further proof that you are under compensated go to guidestar.org, look at the form 990's which shows the compensation of the top 5 employees, and report back. If they are making under $50k then maybe this is an organization where everyone is sacrificing to save the world. If they are making $150k, then you know you are a sucker.
Good luck. Control your destiny. Don't wait for others to control it for you.
Thank you for the advice and the facepunches. I'm still thinking of how to have this conversation; maybe asking for additional responsibilities (college advisor?) for some extra money. A mostly irrelevant paragraph about someone else's salary follows.
I felt a bit like I was snooping around, but did set up an account on guidestar.org to check out the 990. They only have to list salaries of people who make more than $100,000 (and the board of trustees, which is $0), and only the head of school made this much. She makes $125,000/year + $9,600 "other compensation" and has been in the education business for about 35 years. For comparison, the head of school at my wife's school (bigger, fancier, but only 5 miles away) makes $255,900/year + $69,400 "other compensation" (maybe his kid's tuition?). It's hard to call $125,000/year a sacrifice (particularly when it's close to 10% of our total budget), but she is making half of what "the other guys" make, and I don't think $125k for running a school after 35 years is unreasonable.
What is this "escrow" crap?
That's for taxes and insurance.
Really? 15 years of working in private schools and I'd be shocked if they do find an extra $5k for a teacher, great or not.
What you've got to understand is that teachers are fairly replaceable and a school doesn't make any more from a great teacher than from a mediocre one. And as noted most schools are not making bucket loads of cash... there's a reason so many teachers end up spending out of their own pockets for school supplies.
I'd say tutoring is your best bet. It's good money and a pleasure to earn usually.
This has been my experience as well.
I've dealt with private schools and many of them are operating on a knife-edge of being in the black. In fact quite a number are operating in the red; one I know just closed down last year for this reason. So I would not be hard put to believe that they simply don't have more money to put into salaries.
Our last school nearly shut down (while we were living on campus housing) but rebounded with a new head of school. We were looking into the face of us both being jobless and homeless for a few months, which was scary. My current school is in good shape this year, but it's not unusual for them to drop 20 kids (30% of enrollment) in a year, which would have a huge impact on the budget.
