Wake commissioners, school board both eye employee pay as budget priority

That will include requests for higher compensation and for more employees to support behavioral health, technology and maintenance needs.

“We do not have competitive compensation,” Moore told the Wake County Board of Education and the Wake County Board of Commissioners during a joint meeting Monday night to discuss their priorities for next year’s county budget. Other government entities, including some school systems, often pay more than the district does, she said, and private industry can pay even more.

Those increases, if funded at ideal levels, would quickly topple the $53.5 million in expected new revenue. According to a slideshow posted from Ellis, the county would need $147.6 million more to cover the impact of inflation, alone. Ellis is not likely to ask for that amount

Pay increases for some employees has resulted in stagnant or improving vacancy rates, data show. But for bus drivers, the shortage has only worsened, topping 30% of driving positions, or 285 vacancies. That means the district must reduce the number of routes it operates and increase “double-backs” — or, times when a bus driver drops children off at school and goes back out to run another route of students for that same school.

“We need a couple hundred more routes than we actually have,” Moore said.

The school system faces a number of challenges and pressures to improve bus service, fix up aging school buildings, better test scores, increase special education services, reduce bullying and eliminate security vulnerabilities in schools. As federal pandemic relief dollars provided nearly half a billion dollars in extra funding over four years for the district, $125 million of that funding has gone toward employee incentives.

The district is also in the middle of a multi-year initiative to raise employee pay and expand staffing to increase services for student support, technology and maintenance and operations.

School Board Member Tara Waters asked Moore if the district has conducted exit interviews and compiled data from them to see why employees are quitting. Moore said she did not have that information in front of her Monday but would compile it for Waters.

The school board will decide whether to recommend Moore’s proposal, but ultimately, the commissioners will decide how much to provide the school system and for county operations.

Additional measures in a new state budget could affect how commissioners proceed and whether — or to what extent — certain budget requests may be still needed. The North Carolina General Assembly could unveil a proposed budget for next year as soon as this week.

Last year, Ellis urged county commissioners to approve tens of millions of dollars less than the school board asked for, but commissioners ultimately provided all but $6 million of the school board’s request, resulting in a $50 million increase in county funding. That largely went toward staffing four new schools, raising minimum wages for employees by $1 above the state minimum, and several other items.

About 35% of the county’s $1.7 billion budget goes toward the school system.

In it, the school board lists raising the minimum wage, funding for more behavioral health support staff and preparing for a drop in federal pandemic relief funding that covers some of that staff.

Wake County provides about 27% of the Wake County Public School System’s budget.

The school system’s overall budget is nearly $2.2 billion, with $1.1 billion coming from the state, $372.2 million coming from the federal government and $594.3 million coming from the county. Local funds, coming from all sources, total $694.6 million. Those amounts don’t include capital expenses.

The school system has already spent $344.2 million of $475 million in pandemic relief dollars it’s received since 2020. The money expires Sept. 30, 2024.