Amid worker pay crisis, School Board conducts work stoppage, postpones meeting with BOCC
In an abdication of their commitment to meet quarterly with the Board of County Commissioners, the DPS School Board has decided to forgo a Joint Meeting originally scheduled for later this morning.
This BCPI article is written by Brian Callaway.
We’ve seen workers resort to work stoppages to express their dissatisfaction. Now the Durham Public Schools Board of Education is refusing to do its work.
The Boards of Education and County Commissioners hold regular joint meetings on a quarterly basis to discuss shared matters. The 2024 Joint Quarterly Meeting Schedule has been posted since at least January and names February 20, 2024 at 9am as the regularly scheduled meeting for this quarter.
But you won’t find the two groups talking today because the Board of Education backed out of the meeting and has requested to push the makeup date to after the March 5 election, according to officials BCPI spoke with from the Clerk to the Board’s office at the County on Monday.
School Board Chair Bettina Umstead and County Commission Chair Nida Allam declined to respond to repeated inquiries from BCPI seeking the reasons for punting the meeting, but the Clerk to the Board’s office stated the delay was because the School Board is already scheduled to meet again this week on Thursday February 22. (The Thursday meeting is the School Board’s regular monthly meeting and has been scheduled since last summer.)
Ongoing pay crisis
This work stoppage by the Board of Education comes as the district is in turmoil following the botched implementation of a comprehensive compensation adjustment. In October 2023, classified workers, who are comprised of non-certified (i.e., non-instructional) staff including maintenance, custodial, transportation, nutritional, instructional assistants, occupational & physical therapists, among others and who make up roughly half of all DPS staff, received notification of long-awaited salary adjustments to address wage compression and changes in market conditions.
For many, the adjustments were a welcome relief after enduring years of wage stagnation. The compensation study pointed out that while NC teachers saw cumulative raises of over 90% since 2000, classified and other state workers received just over 40% in raises, which was well below the Consumer Price Index of 68% over that time period.
After workers received written notification of their new salaries and even received multiple months of their new paychecks, DPS abruptly announced on January 12 that pay cuts were necessary due to “errors” and initially threatened to seek back payment from roughly 1300 classified workers who were impacted. (There are over 2200 classified workers in total.)
DPS administration later identified that they underestimated the total budgetary cost of the salary adjustments by roughly $7 million per year due to misunderstandings in how they would count years of experience for workers. Public sector employees are paid by fixed tabulations based on the salary grade of the position and number of years of experience the employee brings.
Workers have been outraged at the prospect of losing $7 million per year in cumulative salaries due to an internal accounting error and have packed subsequent School Board meetings where the topic has been discussed—but not yet resolved.
A crowd of mostly DPS workers packed the Staff Development Center on Thursday January 25, 2024, leads chants of “Start the meeting” after School Board members were over 40 minutes late to arrive at the meeting. Video courtesy of BCPI subscribers.
Meetings without resolution
The School Board has held public meetings on January 25, February 2, and February 8 to discuss the issue. At the two February meetings, DPS administration proposed multiple options to adjust pay moving forward, all of which would strip classified workers from millions in promised salaries.
Workers extended public comment that nearly uniformly demanded that actions be taken to preserve the salaries that were previously established. Many DPS parents have joined those calls and spoken in support of workers receiving what was promised.
The annual operating budget of Durham Public Schools, excluding capital outlay budgets, is over $620 million. The classified worker salary increases primarily come from local funding, and in FY23-24, Durham County allotted over $187 million in local funds to Durham Public Schools.
But DPS administration has been reporting to the School Board that they cannot afford the $2.3 million needed to continue paying workers throughout the fiscal year and have proposed various scenarios that would cut workers pay between $5.6 million and $8.9 million next year. Chair Umstead has been joined by Natalie Beyer and Jovonia Lewis in voting for a resolution that would eliminate $5.6 million in salaries, but the measure failed on February 8 with the other four members voting against it.
The Board has passed stop gap measures to remove the threat of the district seeking repayments from workers and to continue paying workers their promised wages for January and then again for February. But all the classified workers remain in a state of limbo about their salaries for March and beyond.
BOCC could be the ‘backstop’ to this ‘emergency’
Anticipating the pending Joint Meeting with the BOCC had given DPS workers and parents hope that a solution could be resolved to pay workers what DPS had promised. The County, having taxation authority, oversees funding disbursements to the public school system, Sheriff’s Office, library system, public health system and more in addition to the direct functions of the County government.
Parents like Girija Mahajan had requested the BOE and BOCC to move their joint meeting earlier than February 20 to address the ongoing crisis and now are left shellshocked at hearing the meeting has been pushed back.
“I don’t understand why the BOE wouldn’t take this opportunity to make the case on behalf of the impacted DPS workers, to ensure our school system can keep functioning. The BOCC is in a position to be the backstop if the district requested.”
DPS classified worker Geoff Seelen from the Hub Farm, who delivered an impassioned address to the School Board on February 2, had similar misgivings about the news that the Joint Meeting was unexpectedly delayed.
“It’s unfortunate the BOE would not use every tool at their disposal to bring about an equitable resolution to this financial emergency.”
What the future may hold
Sources indicate that the School Board is prepared to hear the same options previously offered from administration at Thursday’s BOE meeting, though the official meeting agenda and supporting documents have not been published yet. If just one more Board member joins Umstead, Beyer and Lewis, then classified workers could collectively lose millions in a single vote.
A classified worker who asked not to be named cited that they already know of workers who are poised to leave.
“I know one guy who has 30 years of experience but only one year that now counts. He says if they don’t get it together, he will leave.”
Ironically, the comprehensive compensation study that was supposed to help attract new employees to fill difficult-to-recruit positions could easily become the mechanism that drives existing employees away from the district. At the very least, this same classified worker has pointed to possible impacts on the quality of work for those who were to stay with the district.
“You get what you pay for,” they said, foreshadowing a possible collapse of morale among classified workers.
Disappointment in the School Board’s actions to fight for their workers was on Seelen’s mind too.
“It is ultimately the Board’s responsibility to lead and protect the workers in our district, and they have refused to do so.”
Already the district has had to shutdown multiple days due to a lack of adequate bus mechanics in attendance. It is unclear if mechanics may call out again if an agreeable resolution is not made on Thursday.
Mahajan lamented: “The Board can’t be upset about workers calling out if they are calling out themselves.”
The School Board next meets on Thursday February 22, 2024 at 6:30pm in the Staff Development Center at 2107 Hillandale Road. The entire Board can be reached by email at BOE@dpsnc.net
DISCLOSURE: The author, Brian Callaway, has spoken publicly in support of DPS classified workers receiving the full pay that was promised, and the author himself is a former DPS classified worker from 2014-19. Other local news outlets reported, erroneously, on Monday that the Joint Meeting was taking place on Tuesday, which necessitated the publishing of this article despite the author’s previous engagement on the matter.
