Niles Community Schools teachers who meet certain qualifications based on job performance and other factors will receive financial compensation at the end of the school year.

The Niles school board approved a merit pay model on Monday, as required by a recent state law.

“The administrators and I have been working on it for several months to be in compliance with the law,” said Supt. Richard Weigel. “There is a legal expectation that you have a system of merit pay in place to reward teachers for the work that they do.”

At this time, it is unknown how much teachers could earn in merit pay.

“Until we get our final (student) count and know exactly what our finances look like for the year, I don’t want to say how much,” Weigel said. “If the state cut money from us tomorrow, you don’t want to put a whole lot of money in the merit pay system because you wouldn’t have it.”

The merit pay plan is based on a points system. Teachers earn points based on factors such as teacher attendance, performance evaluations and student performance.

At the end of the school year, the amount of merit pay will be divided by the total number of points earned by all staff in order to establish the dollar value for each point earned.

Teachers are required to keep track of how many points they earned then have those points confirmed by the building principal.