TLDR: Minnesota teacher looking for advice on a law firm to reach out to regarding unpaid wages and what kind of evidence to collect for them
I'm a teacher in Minnesota, USA. For those who do not know, to get full time pay teachers need to work what is considered 1.0 FTEs. If you work more or less, your pay goes up or down accordingly. At my school we have a 6 period day, and a full time FTE is having a class 5 of those period and a prep hour the other part of the day. A teacher that teaches all 6 period would earn 20% more than their base pay.
The last 4 years I've taught in a program within the high school that has lower class sizes and to help the program grow the administrator in charge convinced me to work 6 class periods, which would normally earn my an extra 20% pay raise, but kept me at my base pay. I was told that we needed to do it to help the program grow and that I could take random hours off to make up for it. In hindsight this was stupid, but I wanted to be a team player so I did it.
Last fall, at the start of this school year I brought this up to my new administrator and asked that I be paid 1.2 this year as that is the schedule I have. They said that “administration won't go along with this” and that “I can try to get away for an hour every now and then”.
Now it's the end of the school year and I'm angry and am probably going to resign. However, I'm also thinking that I might be about to take this to a lawyer and see if I can get some of these wages back. Over the course of 4 years I would have earned $46k more than they paid me…very substantial!
So i guess I'm looking for advice on who to speak to, what evidence to collect, etc.