Putnam Schools First Budget Draft: 29 New Employees, Pay Raises

The Putnam County Schools want to use more than $8 million in new state funding to increase salaries and add new personnel.

Director of Schools Corby King highlighted a first draft of the new fiscal year budget Thursday night. King said they believe the new state funding formula should produce an additional $12 million in revenue, though final numbers will not be known until next month.

The budget includes 29 new employees, about $2.35 million in expenses. Among the new employees, 15.5 positions that came to the school system during COVID. King said the positions proved beneficial, especially in the area of addressing long-term learning loss.

“We got some programs that we felt like we needed that would help streamline student learning and target some of those long time gaps that we had,” King said. “With this budget, we’re going to start addressing how we sustain that over time.”

In addition, the system wants to increase pay for its current teachers and administrative staff. King said that includes a $46,500 starting salary for new teachers next year.

“How do we recruit and how do we retain teachers?” King said. “How do we encourage our high school seniors that are not sure what they’re going to do when they leave high school and they’re going into college and they don’t know what major? How do we encourage them to look at education and think about that? How do we get those college kids who are still a little bit unsure to change that major and go into education? We love the profession. We need our best and brightest. It’s going to take a competitive salary to get there. So we want to start addressing that.”

King said the system wants to scrap its current pay scale, which many consider difficult to understand, and go back to a step pay program. King said the change would not happen all at once, but rather, would take several years to play out.

“It’s going to be with much more aggressive steps than what we had at the time in the old plan,” King said.

The focus on employee pay across the system in recent years has already shown benefits, according to the school system director. The system has 100 more employees today than previously.

“We think that’s because the board took an aggressive step in improving salaries last year, the $3 minimum per hour, we are more fully staffed than we have been in several years,” King said. “When you look at bus drivers, school nutrition, teachers assistants, we still have a few holes. But when we analyze, I know we’ve not added 100 new positions in ESSER. How do we have 100 more? It’s because we fill positions that have been left vacant for a lot of years. We want to continue making those salary improvements so we can show that our support staff, we value them, we need them in our system, but also for our certified staff.”

Inflation has also impacted the budget. King said the system has budgeted a $840,000 increase in utilities, for example.

The budget is based on four tenets of the school system’s new strategic plan, set to be implemented in June. They include improving student success, making sure all plans are aligned across the district, better recruitment and retainment of teachers, and the maintenance of safe and comfortable learning spaces.

King said the goal during the budget process bring county commissioners a zero increase budget. The school board will meet with commissioners Monday night to discuss the budget and the system’s future plans.

The $116 million budget draft includes a current gap of $1.267 million gap. King said that is not unusual at this stage of the budget process.

“So we still have a lot of unknowns,” King said. “As I said, we still haven’t got that final TISA (Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement) allocation. We still will have to watch that. We don’t know what our penny increase penny rate increase will be from the county general yet.”

The state is expected to give the system the final funding number in June. King said at last count, the number stood at $12.38 million.

The School Board approved the first draft Thursday night.