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The Wake school board approved more than $13 million in adjustments to its more than $2.2 billion budget Tuesday night, 7-0. Board Member Cheryl Caulfield was absent.
The changes include money for higher-than-expected utility and academic costs, based on nearly equivalent savings so far this year.
It doesn’t include any new teacher raises because the state hasn’t passed a new budget that includes any.
It also didn’t include major investments in maintenance and operations, a department that’s struggling to address the smaller and more routine maintenance issues that are higher in number than the bigger issues that are prioritized.
“We’re spending only three-quarters of what the industry says we need to be spending… to maintain the facilities we manage,” Board Chairman Chris Heagarty said.
By once again not following the recommendations of its five-year maintenance plan, Heagarty said the plan will now be nine years.
The lack of a state budget has put on pause some of school districts’ plans for their budgets this year, but not all.
The Wake County school board already approved more than $18 million in budget cuts for this year in an interim budget passed this summer, including the elimination of 10 digital learning coordinators, some secretarial jobs, some unfilled social worker and counselor positions, and other expenses. It also included raising air conditioning set points by one degree and lowering heating set points by one degree — a measure undertaken during the tight budget of the Great Recession, as well.
Those moves were in part so the district could afford to open four new schools next year and pay for expected increases to salary and benefits from the state.
Little increase in maintenance funding
The years of deferred maintenance spending are because the school board has time and again rejected recommendations for maintenance funding in favor of other hiring and raises, Heagarty said.
“I don’t think anyone will fault us for money we put into he classrooms, money spent supporting teachers and students, but the working conditions in our buildings also support students,” Heagarty said.
Other board members on Tuesday urged the district to find ways to address the smaller maintenance issues that are visible every day to students and families but are waiting a month or longer to be addressed, according to district data.
The district has further prioritized bigger maintenance issues, leading to improvements in fix times for them, but worse fix times for smaller issues. Unlike in recent years, the district has only closed one school so far this year because of an air conditioning issue. That reflect the district’s work but also cooler temperatures putting less stress on HVAC equipment, Superintendent Robert Taylor said.
“We have to do something different, we have to be more aggressive toward it and change what we’re dealing with here, to keep recruitment up, to keep people coming to the schools,” Board Member Toshiba Rice said.
Planning without a state budget
This spring, Wake County Public School System officials estimated more than $60 million in new expenses next year, without increasing any programming, aside from opening the new schools. That was because they expected employee salaries and benefits to go up. When the state increases pay, benefit costs can increase, and individual school systems must raise pay for locally funded employees to match the pay of state-funded employees.
Wake County commissioners approved giving the school system more than $40 million in additional funding to help cover the expected costs, requiring the district to find things to cut to make up the difference.
Teachers and many other, but not all, school employees received step increases in a mini budget passed earlier this fall. Those are the pay increases that come with another year of service to state employment, typically totaling less than $1,000.
Teachers will also pay more come January for the state health plan, which for the first time introduced a system of premiums based on pay. In Wake County, 84% of employees’ premiums went up, and some, especially higher-experienced teachers who aren’t eligible for step increases — will see shrinking take-home pay in January.
The district wants to use about $13.2 million in unexpected savings so far this year to cover utilities and academic and literacy help for students that largely represents unexpected costs incurred for those programs. For example, a change to federal funding rules is prompting a plan to use $1.8 million for literacy coaches, and a drop in state funding is prompting a plan to use another $1.8 million for career and technical education programs.
The $13.6 million in unexpected savings could cover the unexpected losses, but it wouldn’t come close to covering the $34.7 million in increased compensation that the board had anticipated from the state. The board expected a 3% increase in base salary for staff from the state budget, but a mini-budget for the state authorized only a step increase for an additional year of experience, rather than changing base pay. The step increase represents a raise for each teacher of less than 1%.
The school board also planned this spring to increase the salary supplement for educators by 1.5%, which would cost about $2.8 million and amount to additional pay of between $110 and $210 for the entire year for a teacher.
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