In spite of the best efforts of the Patrick County School Board, pay in the division lags behind salaries in other localities.
School Board Chairman Ronnie Terry recalled when he first took his seat on the board, “we hadn’t given a step raise in several years,” and one of his goals was to give employees a raise.
Slowly, wages have increased, but they still are lower than in adjoining divisions of Floyd and Henry counties.
For instance, starting pay for a teacher with zero to three years experience in Patrick is $36,981. Pay scales in Henry and Floyd counties are structured to include teachers with zero to two years experience. In Henry County, starting pay is $40,084 and in Floyd County, starting pay is $39,341, according to online information. (Complete salary scales for the three localities are available online.)
“I’d love to give everybody more of a raise than we’ve been able to give,” Terry said. “Everybody thinks we’ve got all this money. I wish we did.”
Schools Superintendent Bill Sroufe said the entire operating budget is roughly $30 million.
“That sounds like a lot of money, and it is a lot of money,” however, it only goes so far, Sroufe said.
About $20 million comes off the top for personnel, he said. A little more than $4 million is earmarked for debt service payments. “That leaves about $6 million for everything else.”
Sroufe said “All of our schools are accredited. I’d love to ask my board to give every employee in the division a $1,000 bonus for a job well done.”
But the bonuses would total nearly $500,000.
“It’s not that they don’t deserve it. They do. It’s that we can’t afford it,” he said.
Part of that is due to the number of employees versus the amount of state funding for raises, officials said.
The board aims to keep existing schools open, officials said. However, according to the state-prescribed formula for funding, the county should have only 3.5 schools, officials said.
When the state approves and sets aside funds for a raise, the only amount the division receives is for the number of employees/positions the state deems necessary for those 3.5 schools, according to school officials.
“It wouldn’t be fair to give a raise just to the SOQ (Standards of Quality) positions funded by the state,” Terry said. “We want to make sure all employees have a raise.”
The school division and often, the county, must come up with money to give a raise to the extra employees over those allotted by the state.
State officials approved a pay hike in 2016-17, and the school board voted to give employees a raise that year.
The raise began at the start of that school year, with the expectation funds from the state would be coming in January, Terry said. However, the state funds did not materialize, and the division bore the entire expense in an already tight budget.
Legislators also approved a 2 percent raise during their last session.
“It still remains to be seen if we get it,” Terry said, and explained the board is waiting until the state funds trickle down in January to help offset the costs of the raise.
