Mid-year pay raises are coming for Wake County school employees
Updated on Dec. 4.
Thousands of Wake County school employees, including teachers, will get mid-year locally funded pay raises, with the biggest salary bump going toward support staff.
The Wake County school board approved Tuesday a series of budget adjustments that will provide raises for all of the district’s employees. School leaders said the raises were made possible because of a variety of reasons, including how charter school enrollment came in much lower than expected while district enrollment was higher than projected.
School finance staff recommended the changes Tuesday. Board members waived policy to add it to Tuesday night’s agenda to get the money into employees’ hands faster.
“I know I’m excited, and I know my colleagues are as well, to be among the first boards of education in the state to move some of our employees to a minimum $15 an hour,” said new school board chairman Keith Sutton.
All non-certified staff, which includes bus drivers, secretaries, custodians, mechanics, maintenance workers, teacher assistants and cafeteria workers, will get a 3% raise retroactive to July 1. Additional targeted raises would raise the minimum salary for bus drivers, which Wake has had a hard time filling, to $15 an hour.
The driver shortage has forced Wake to reduce the number of buses on the road.
Board members talked about the need to give raises to the district’s lowest paid employees, who they say have been largely ignored by state lawmakers.
“There’s a lot of great things in this budget that deal with those employees that the state has basically ignored for the last half-dozen budget cycles,” said school board member Bill Fletcher. “I’m very excited to see this come.”
Bonus for support staff
The raises will go into effect in January paychecks. But support staff will also get a one-time $500 bonus that will come in their December paychecks.
Kristin Beller, president of Wake NCAE, said the raises will make a significant financial difference for the non-certified staff.
“Thank you for using the limited funding availability to prioritize making sure that every Wake County school employee sees some kind of increase,” Beller told the board.
Certified staff, which includes teachers, will get an additional 1/2% increase in the supplement that the school district provides on top of the amount paid by the state. The school board had already built a 1/2% increase in the budget.
The total 1% increase to the salary supplement for teachers is retroactive to July 1 and will be paid beginning in January 2020 paychecks.
State budget deadlock
School officials say they’re making the mid-year budget adjustments to reflect how the state, which provides the majority of the district’s funding, hasn’t finalized its budget yet. The Republican-led General Assembly and Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper have deadlocked on the budget over concerns about Medicaid funding and the amount for teacher raises.
Lawmakers had provided an average 3.9% raise over two years for teachers and 2% raise over 2 years for school support staff. But Cooper vetoed the bill, calling the increases paltry.
Senate Republicans accused NCAE of hypocrisy for supporting both the Wake school raises and Cooper’s vetoes. They said while employees in Wake, one of the state’s richest districts will get raises, the vetoes mean “employees in the poorest school districts get nothing.”
“It is truly baffling that when Republicans propose a 3.9% pay raise, the NCAE and Governor call them ‘paltry,’ but when Wake County Democrats provide a 0.5% raise, the NCAE praises them,” Sen. Deanna Ballard, a Watauga County Republican, said in a statement Wednesday. “The NCAE is not an organization that advocates for teachers. The NCAE is an organization that advocates for teachers to vote Democrat.”
David Neter, Wake’s chief operating officer, said the district expects to be able to fund any share of pay raises that the state does provide.
School finance staff said they were able to come up with money for the locally funded raises by shifting other money around.
For instance, charter schools were projected to have 15,276 Wake students. But they only have 14,084 students, meaning the district will have $3.5 million less it has to turn over to charter schools.
At the same time, school officials say unofficial state figures show that enrollment for the district reached 161,907 students — 1,436 more children than last year. District planners had only projected growth of more than 500 students this year.
School board member Jim Martin said this year’s higher-than-expected growth shows that last year’s gain of only 42 students was an aberration.
School board members said the new raises were made possible by how much the Wake County Board of Commissioners has increased school funding over the past several years. This included a $45 million increase this year.
“We’ve worked real hard to get local funding and will continue to work together (with commissioners) on that until the state realizes that we can’t do this forever,” said school board member Roxie Cash. “We can not use local funding in Wake County forever to make up the difference with the state funding. Until then I appreciate this budget.”
This story was originally published December 3, 2019 at 5:41 PM.
