The North Little Rock School District is getting ready to offer a pay raise and stipends to teachers and staff members.
After rejecting a proposal from teachers to increase their salaries by $4,000, the School Board will again open negotiations with teachers during a meeting today, Superintendent Gregory Pilewski said.
The school district presented a preliminary plan Thursday to raise pay for teacher and staffers.
Chief Financial Officer Brian Brown said during the meeting that the school district is prepared to pay a combined $2 million more to teachers and staff members beginning in fiscal 2023. Under the plan, licensed personnel -- meaning teachers and other workers with state-required certification -- will receive 71% of those funds for salary increases.
Classified personnel -- meaning maintenance works, custodial staffers, secretaries, clerks, paraprofessionals, aides, and food service and transportation workers -- would get 29% of the funds under the proposal. For classified employees that would mean about a 2% increase each, according to Brown.
The proposal also includes a $3,000 retention stipend and one-time covid pay for all employees. The covid pay would be based on how many on-site days employees worked, with staffers being able to make up to $2,700.
The covid-pay would be paid by federal stimulus dollars from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund with requirements for staffers to finish out the current school year to be eligible.
The school district also is proposing a $1,500 bonus for all employees, which would be paid from the Building Fund.
The retention stipend would begin in fiscal 2023 under the plan, with the goal of keeping staff members in the school district, a challenge for administrators as many teachers complain of low pay and poor working conditions.
Pilewski called the proposal a draft, saying "this is the best information we have at the moment that we want to share."
Pilewski said he will meet with teachers and staffers today and present a final plan Jan. 16.
Pilewski and Human Resources Executive Director Jacob Smith talked about the need for both pay increases and for the district to be financially solvent. Much of the district's funding is tied to enrollment. An increase in enrollment of 500 students would mean an additional $3.6 million in funding for the district, Pilewski said.
"I believe that is a very obtainable goal and everybody benefits -- students first," Pilewski said.
The North Little Rock School District has a poor teacher retention rate compared with other districts around the state with a 54% turnover rate for the 2020-21 school year compared with 17% statewide, according to the Arkansas Department of Education.
The retention stipend would be for $3,000 per year over a two-year period with the staff needing to meet a two-year commitment to be eligible for the funds.
"This retention plan is something that's been done all throughout the state in order to promote a retention and recruitment piece during these trying times to help attract and garner and keep staff," Smith said.
During a meeting with the North Little Rock School District Board of Education in November, representatives from the teacher's Licensed Personnel Policy Committee presented a plan asking for teachers to get $4,000 pay bumps.
Carolyn Jackson, chairperson of the Licensed Personnel Policy Committee, said that given the high-turnover rate, some classrooms in the district don't have permanent teachers, and because of that many classes are being led by substitutes. For teachers in the district, it has been more than a decade since they last received non-mandated pay raises, Jackson said.
"We are requesting the salary proposal -- the salary raise -- based on a long history of our teachers having done without the raise," Jackson said during the November meeting. "It's been well over 10 years since the last time teachers have received a raise."
The plan was rejected by the board. School Board member Angela Person-West said in November that teacher pay should be tied to performance.
"Even though teachers are financially behind the eight ball, we're kind of turning out students who are behind the eight ball also," she said. "So to me, raises merit -- or kind of go along with -- performance."