School board talks increasing teacher supplements, safety
By Joey Pitchford
Published in News on May 22, 2018 5:50 AM
One of the district's major fiscal concerns, low-wealth funding, is expected to be taken care of for this year.
The district will most likely be able to make up the $1.5 million in low-wealth funding it will lose in the General Assembly's 2018-19 budget this year, said superintendent Dr. Michael Dunsmore, with around $700,000 coming from the state and another $800,000 coming from a proposed 2.65 cent property tax increase by the Wayne County commissioners.
That increase would also help the school system hire more school resource officers, as well as begin the process of increasing teacher supplements by .5 percent.
Dunsmore said that he spoke with Goldsboro Mayor Chuck Allen last week to request that the city include funding in its budget for the coming year for supplement increases at city schools.
The Goldsboro City Council will hold a work session on its budget today at 9 a.m.
Last year, the school district requested that the county fund a set of supplement increases, which would bring Wayne County's supplement from 6.5 percent to 9 percent over five years.
The commissioners declined to fund the increase then, but have taken another look at the issue this year as supplements in surrounding counties continue to exceed Wayne County's. Wilson County pays certified teachers an 8 percent supplement, and Johnston County provides a supplement of about 11 percent. Wake County teacher supplements are even higher ---- closer to 20 percent.
Board member Len Henderson said that the board should be pushing for a larger increase to supplements.
"I think that we, as advocates for teachers, should be asking for more," he said.
"I think that we need to go out and tell them that our teachers deserve more than half a percent, knowing already that they have agreed to half a percent. We need to put a bargaining chip out there for us."
Henderson said that the share of the school board's budget provided by the county has been cut in half since 2015.
"One thing I found very interesting is that in 2015, 28 percent of our budget was contributed by the county," he said. "Today ---- 14.7.
"So you can see the reductions that the county has made in giving to us a school system."
Board member Arnold Flowers said that the county and the school system have work left to do to get the schools to an appropriate level of funding.
"The way I see it, Ms. Henderson, the school system has been underfunded for generations, and now we're trying to play so catch-up," he said. "This board has really tried to help us."
Dunsmore said that the school system is also looking to expand the Restart program used at Goldsboro High School.
The Restart model allows low-performing schools to have flexibility similar to that of a charter school, and Dunsmore said that using the same model at other schools would give the district extra funding flexibility.
"That's how we were paying those stipends to Goldsboro High School, because we had money we would otherwise have to revert back to the state that we could use for that," he said.
"We're looking into the option of maybe doing Restarts for some of our low-performing and high-poverty schools so we can put a similar structure in place on our own."
The board also discussed building projects in the county, which have begun to pile up in recent years as old buildings require repairs and growing populations necessitate new classrooms.
Henderson said that the planned construction of a new gym at Southern Wayne High School is expected to cost more than the $2 million originally allocated for the project.
That money was part of a bond referendum which also provided $1.2 million for classrooms at the school.
"What we are experiencing from our discussions is that it is going to take well in excess of $2 million to do that gymnasium," he said
"So one of the things I would hope this board and Dr. Dunsmore would agree to, is to go ahead and ask the commissioners if they would relieve us of having that 1.2 [million dollars] set aside for classrooms and allow us to utilize that to go in our pot of money for the gymnasium."
Board member Chris West cautioned the rest of the board not to be too hasty with building project projections, as lumber prices are expected to spike dramatically in the coming months.
"There's a group in the United States, LMC ----they're a forest product buying group ---- there's some 1,400 of them throughout the United States.
"They pretty much control the price of a finished lumber product, a two-by-four, a two-by-two. We've always had increases every year in the building industry, increases of eight percent, nine percent, whatever," he said.
"They sent a memo out that, effective June 1, the potential for all wood product increase at the building supply outlets are 119 percent, across the board."
An increase of that magnitude would mean that construction projects after June 1 could be substantially more expensive -- a two-by-four that costs $2 today would cost around $5 after the increase.
"Even a 25-percent increase would affect what we're doing," West said.
"If it's anything more than what we're normally doing, we're going to have to go back to the drawing board on some of these projects that we've already got established and bid out because the product and material costs are going to go through the roof."
The board also viewed statistics regarding the cost of implementing class-size reductions ahead of the schedule set by the General Assembly earlier this year.
Implementing the full set of reductions at five low-performing elementary schools, as the board voted to do Feb. 27, would cost the district $1,564,000, said assistant superintendent David Lewis.
The district could instead choose to only partially implement the reductions. Getting one year ahead of the required reductions would cost the district essentially nothing, Dunsmore said, because the General Assembly will begin funding art, music and physical education positions during a year when no class-size reductions are yet required.
"Next year is a holds harmless, so we're getting one quarter of the money primarily for arts, music, those kinds of teachers to start funding them," he said.
"We could move the four year plan up by a year and actually be in the second year of this and it will basically cost us nothing."
The board is expected to consider the issue at its May 29 meeting.