Overton Board Concerned About Pay Scale

The Overton County School Board plans to reassess its pay scale with a focus on annual raises for staff.

Board Member Ricky Dodson said he has received multiple comments about how certain positions are paid. Dodson said one example is how a maintenance custodian only makes thirty cents more per hour than a normal custodian if both have five years with the district.

“So there’s not enough difference in some of them areas and I think we need to go back and revisit some of that and see what’s at stake,” Dodson said. “Like a lunch room monitor and a regular food service manager, there’s not a lot of difference there either. I mean there’s a few areas we might want to tweak.”

Board Chair William Abston said they need to be careful of budgetary constraints because their ESSER funding has run out. He said he is concerned the state will decrease funding for TISA.

“If we’re increasing and we have more people here then we’re not going to be able to fit all of that in the budget,” Abston said. “So there’s going to come a breaking point so we’ve got to pay attention to that too.”

Abston said the last time they adjusted their pay scale they decided to focus on rewarding those who have been with the district the longest instead of annual increases.

“That sort of died in the conversation, about expanding if you are here from one year to two years, increasing the amount from there,” Abston said. “It was more along of, you know, we just want to raise them up so they’re making what these people in other positions are making.”

Dodson said these pay scales continue to struggle after the five-year mark and do not increase by much all the way up to fifteen years.

Dodson said giving two dollar raises to the different roles they were discussing would cost the district some $137,000.