At a time of squeezed school budgets, furloughs, and shrinking tax digests, the roughly 12,000 employees of Fulton County Schools on Tuesday were given a rare thing: a pay raise.
Of the four major county districts in metro Atlanta — Gwinnett, Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton — Fulton, with 95,000 students, is the only one proposing to give raises next year. City of Decatur schools tentatively plan to give across-the-board pay raises next year of 1.25 percent.
The 3 percent across-the-board pay hike in Fulton will show up in 12-month employees’ paychecks in July and in most teacher’s paychecks in September. It will cost the district about $15 million. For the average teacher, it translates into $1,570, said Fulton chief financial officer Robert Morales.
Superintendent Robert Avossa said he’s talked to about 4,000 teachers this year, small groups at a time, and they always ask about compensation. For the past two years they have been given one-time bonuses, but they haven’t had raises in five years.
Jennifer Couch, principal at Hapeville Elementary School, said the pay raise, at a time when other districts are not giving raises, is a boost for morale. “I’m proud of the Fulton County school board for giving us a raise when a lot of other folks aren’t getting raises. Our employees work hard, this comes at a good time.”
When work began on budget, “we started with the idea that we really wanted to get raises on the table and we didn’t want to raise taxes,” said Avossa. The process took hundreds of hours and required that every department head start from scratch and defend every planned expenditure, said Avossa.
To make the numbers work – even though the budget overall shrank this year, by 0.6 percent, and combined costs for health insurance, pension contributions, and enrollment rose $16.2 million – the district had to trim about $17 million in expenditures, said chief financial officer Robert Morales.
Fulton’s overall budget for 2013-2014 is $1.17 billion. Morales said the budget is based on the expectation that property revenues for the year will be down about 1.5 percent. The district will get the final tax projections next week.
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