News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
The White County Board of Education tabled a decision Thursday night on teacher bonuses attached to Governor Bill Lee’s school voucher system.
Lee signed the bill this week which provides public school teachers a $2,000 bonus. It would include K-12 teachers who are certified and have students in front of them at least 50 percent of the workday. Board Member Jayson McDonald said he wanted to table the decision as he felt the school board should pay similar bonuses to employees who do not meet those requirements.
“You know they might not have students in front of them every day for 50 percent of the time but they deserve to be recognized,” McDonald said. “And I just think the governor has done a disservice here by just including just the teachers. I think we need to be thinking about what we can do for our staff as well.”
Director of Schools Kurt Dronebarger said the teacher bonuses would be paid out by the state on June 30 for the 2025 fiscal year and that the board has until June 1 to approve a resolution. Dronebarger said he has not seen the complete set of rules revolving around teacher bonuses but could look into how much it would cost the school district to pay similar bonuses to the remaining employees.
“There’s been a lot of word of mouth,” Dronebarger said. “I have not seen any actual hard copy of any rules. I have not seen that in writing but with that in mind, I can start some preliminary numbers of who would be outside of that box and then what it would take to even that up so the board would have some fiscal information to go from to make an educated decision.”
Dronebarger said the board will have to weigh options of how it wants to go about the bonuses. Dronebarger said a good portion of employees would not qualify for the bonuses.
“It’s gonna leave a lot of people out so that will leave the board with some options of either not everybody would receive that bonus or the board would have to look at paying that locally out of our funds,” Dronebarger said. “It doesn’t include any staff of which we have about 300.”
The school board must have an approved resolution by June 1 and if not, the state will not provide the money to the school district for the bonuses. McDonald said he does not agree with the requirement that school boards have to approve a resolution in order for their teachers to receive the bonuses.
“I don’t like the fact that the governor is forcing us to accept what he pushed through in a special session to give our teachers the money that they deserve,” McDonald said. “These teachers, all this staff deserve extra money because I mean what they have to put up with here on a daily basis I’m sure is not easy. So I don’t like the fact the governor is forcing us to do something like this just because we don’t like what he did.”
In other business, The board approved the TSA field trip, WCHS Interact Club field trip, WCMS FFA field trip, and a JROTC field trip. The board approved a WCHS Boys’ Soccer Fundraiser request. The fundraiser is with Brad Durham Fundraisers.
The board approved the ’25-’26 school year calendar.
