What Happened to the Last 15 Years?

I got a job offer today from the local public school district for next school year as a 5&6th grade English as Second Language teacher. Yeah! Only trouble is that they don't want to put me any higher on the pay scale than a teacher with a master's degree and 4 years of experience! I don't think so. The human resources lady is to check with the superintendant and let me know on Monday if they can do any better than that. It would be a $10,000 salary decrease and I value my experience more than to accept that. ThinkPositive!