Wake school board approves new bus driver attendance bonus, Master's pay for teachers and social workers

The Wake County Board of Education approved two different measures Tuesday night to raise compensation for some of its hardest-to-fill positions.

The school board approved extra pay for educators with advanced degrees, affecting about 650 of the district’s nearly 20,000 employees and resulting in raises of well more than $1,000 to several thousand dollars.

The board also approved a second, more frequent attendance bonus for bus drivers and make more transportation staff eligible for it. Total bonuses for bus drivers could now total up to $3,000 in a single year. The lowest-paid bus drivers earn about $22,000 annually.

The additional compensation could cost as much as $6.1 million more annually. The district says it has local savings that will cover at least some of the cost. Transportation bonuses would be covered through lapsed salary and other savings in the high-vacancy transportation department. It would take effect at the beginning fo the next school year, in July.

Offering advanced degree pay could set Wake County apart from other counties, said A.J. Muttillo, district assistant superintendent for human resources. “Very few” other districts also offer advanced degree pay.

In the past two years, the district has raised wages and local supplements and provided bonuses for nearly every employee in an effort to entice applicants and keep employees. Much of that spending, totaling tens of millions of dollars, has come from federal pandemic relief funds.

The Wake County Public School System is short on bus drivers, without as many full-time substitute drivers as it normally relies upon. Meanwhile, the number of vacancies among drivers keeps growing, leaving bus routes uncovered and parents and students having to find last-minute ways of getting to school.

Robert Snidemiller, senior director of transportation, said vacancies are as high as a third among various transpiration staff, including bus drivers and bus safety assistants. On top of that, 12% to 15% call out each day, while the district has the built-in capacity to handle a far smaller percentage of callouts. One callout affects about 120 students, said Mark Strickland, district chief facilities and operations officer.

“We hope this attendance bonus will reduce the number of uncovered runs and serves as a recruitment and retention tool,” Snidemiller said.

Board members favored the bonus as a way to help students and families disrupted by bus route cancellations that’s not just aimed at reducing vacancies.

“This actually gets to addressing a real disconnect,” Board Member Chris Heagarty said. Bus routes are still being canceled in spite of the district technically having enough drivers on staff, he said. “It looks like absenteeism might really be a part of that problem.”

Board Member Tara Waters asked district officials if they knew why employees were calling out so much. Strickland said the district was compiling data on it and hoped to have some answers soon.

The proposal to pay educators more for having advanced degrees provided some relief to employees Tuesday.

“I think it’ll change a lot of lives,” said Phuong Nguyen, a social worker at Vandora Springs Elementary School.

Nguyen and her wife, Brittany, are both social workers in the school system.

They had two baby boys last summer and complications that resulted in several hospital stays and thousands of dollars in medical debt.

Nguyen earns about $47,000 per year, and Brittany earns about $48,000 per year. Both have Master’s degrees but obtained them after the North Carolina General Assembly cut off educators’ ability to obtain higher pay for having an advanced degree.

They visit food pantries, shop secondhand, sell their clothing, don’t eat at restaurants, and Nguyen drives Door Dash on the weekends. They afforded Christmas gifts for their children with the help of others.

If the board hadn’t approved Master’s pay for school social workers, Nguyen thinks she’d need to find a higher paying job in the coming years.

Nguyen said another colleague also mentioned struggling to buy her children Christmas gifts.

“Why are we worried about that? We're helping not just students, our school. We're helping staff and our community, but no one's really supporting us.”

Nguyen, who had worked in other social work positions before coming to the school system, said she got a Master’s degree because she believed it would help her career and help her support a family.

“But we're struggling using the same resources as our clients,” Nguyen said.

School social workers work with children and families who need extra help. They connect families with physical and mental health, financial, housing and food resources. They do home visits and work with students to improve their attendance.

Nguyen’s school has a food pantry and a clothing closet, and social workers organize a Christmas gift drive and deliver the gifts to families.

Another bus driver bonus

School bus drivers and bus team leaders are currently eligible for two $500 attendance bonuses for each semester of school. They’re allowed to miss up to two days of work to remain eligible. During the most recent semester, 47% of bus drivers and bus team leaders qualified — 308 of 660 employees.

The new bonus includes more transportation employees, including safety assistants and mechanics. The district has begun hiring more safety assistants and has also been short on mechanics.

The new bonus is $200 for each month an employee had perfect attendance over the 10-month school year.

The change means more money and more bus drivers eligible for it.

A bus driver who qualified for the current bonus would receive an even higher second bonus if they had the exact same attendance record under the revised bonus plan. For example, if they missed two days each semester in two separate months, they would earn $2,200 in bonus pay, up from $1,000.

More bus drivers who didn’t qualify for the current bonus could qualify for the new bonus with the exact same attendance record, so long as they had perfect attendance for at least one month. For example, a bus driver who missed three days in a row because of illness would not have qualified for the $500 semester attendance bonus. But if they otherwise had a perfect attendance record that semester, they would get four attendance bonuses of $200 for the other four months, or $800.

If every eligible transportation worker qualified for the bonus, it would cost $1.7 million annually.

This fall, the district redrew its bus routes to require just 584 routes, each with their own driver, and 31 substitute drivers. That reduced the transportation system’s capacity to handle bus driver absences in half but set the district’s staffing goal at 615 drivers — the same number it reported having at the time.

But data from February show the district has 597 drivers now.

Board Chairwoman Lindsay Mahaffey said the proposals before the board Tuesday came at the suggestion of the school system.

But she and other board members have been discussing ways to recruit and retain more employees — especially bus drivers — for months.

“When a bus is not available that day because somebody is out, it’s hard for many of our families,” Mahaffey said. “And, being a parent, I’ve gotten that call throughout this year and last year, and it’s hard to have to rearrange your whole day. This not only helps our bus drivers by providing that monetary incentive more frequently but hopefully our families as well.”

A return to advanced degree pay

Extra pay for the district's 650 educators who have advanced degrees but no pay bump for them would cost $4.4 million annually.

Vacancy rates have been relatively stable across some other categories regularly reported by the district.

The teacher vacancy rate hasn’t changed much from a year ago, staying around 2.5%. However, the district’s teacher workforce includes more first-time teachers and alternatively licensed teachers than in the past two years.

Gail Siemer, a health teacher at Fuquay-Varina High School, coaches and works at a restaurant on the weekend to earn extra money. She has a master’s degree but isn’t paid extra for it, having earned it in 2016.

“I work almost seven days a week unless I intentionally take a day off,” Siemer said.

She likes her school and doesn’t see herself leaving education but knows some schools can be more stressful environments, causing teachers to wonder if what they’re being paid is worth it. Whispers are common among teachers about what else they might do for a living.

“I believe master’s pay would be beneficial in terms of retaining us,” Siemer said.

For both teachers and school social workers, the pay increase would be 10%. For other educators who have an advanced degree that isn’t required, they would receive an additional $126 per month on top of their salary. For educators with doctoral degrees that aren’t required, they would receive an additional $253 per month on top of their existing salary.

Those other educators include school psychologists, guidance counselors, speech language pathologists and audiologists.

On Tuesday, a group of occupational and physical therapists spoke during the school board’s public comment period, lamenting that they are not included in current compensation increase conversations. The groups argued they are treated different as “classified” staff, rather than “certified” educators and earn thousands of dollars less than occupational and physical therapists in some nearby school districts, including Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools and Johnston County Schools.

The public comment period featured 26 speakers, nearly all of whom asked the school system to provide more money — to compensate more employees, renovate deteriorating and leaking West Cary Middle School buildings and hire an American Sign Language interpreter for Wiley Elementary School’s deaf students, among other things.

Social workers have been coming to board meetings since late last year, asking for higher pay. All who have come have master’s degrees and some earn around $47,000 or $48,000. A few have said they weren’t sure they could afford Christmas gifts for their children and said they visited the same food pantries they tell their students’ families to visit.

They’ve also reached out to state lawmakers, who ended extra pay for educators who had non-required advanced degrees back in 2013. Conversation at the time was largely around whether teachers with master’s degrees were more effective than those who didn’t have them, though the change affected more employees than just teachers.

No vacancy data exist for school social workers, though social workers have said colleagues have quit because of the low pay.

Social workers argue that having a master’s degree is a de facto requirement for the job because of how commonly master’s degrees are obtained and required in other social work fields. Social workers with advanced degrees can get preference in job searches over those who don’t have them.

Mahaffey said she’d like to see the state eventually restore advanced degree pay for all educators in North Carolina.

“But in lieu of that, we know we have a need for more social workers in this county,” Mahaffey said. “So if we’re able to do this as a stop gap then it’s certainly something that we’re looking into doing but also making sure that we continue to have master’s pay on our legislative agenda because it’s beneficial to everyone in our state.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story included incorrect information about the bus driver attendance bonus. It will be an additional attendance bonus of $200 per month, on top of the existing attendance bonus of $500 for each semester.