School Board slashes wages for over 1300 workers

Late Thursday night the Durham Board of Education ended the ongoing salary uncertainty faced by 1,875 essential support workers by choosing an option that decreases pay to 1,389 of those workers.

This BCPI article is written by Brian Callaway.

After experiencing nearly six weeks of uncertainty over the future of their wages, DPS workers again packed the Staff Development Center on Thursday evening for the February Monthly Meeting of the Board of Education. Directly affected workers, allied teachers, and supportive parents spoke with a nearly unanimous message: “pay your workers what was promised.”

But over four hours later, that cry landed with a thud: the School Board voted to discard the pay schedule that had been implemented since October 2023 and instead revert to a flat raise of 11% based on previous FY22-23 salaries.

From data presented by the district, the changes will impact 1,875 classified staff comprising of maintenance workers, custodians, instructional assistants, occupational and physical therapists, bus mechanics, transportation support staff and other essential support staff.

Of the 1,875 workers affected, 1,389 or 74% will experience a pay decrease when the new salaries go into effect next month while 486 or 26% will experience a pay increase. A staggering 1,027 of those who will be losing wages currently make less than $43,450 per year—which is the starting salary of a first-year teacher at DPS.

Slide from DPS presentation with emphasis added (red box) denoting the option voted by the Board on Thursday and its impact on the number of workers who will receive more or less in salary under the newly adopted repeal. Note: the salaries expressed in the “January 2024 Letter” were never implemented; workers had been receiving salaries through February 2024 based on the October 2023 Letter.

Slide from DPS presentation that focuses on classified workers who make less than $43,450 annually. Of the 1389 workers who will receive lower wages under the newly adopted repeal, 1027 of them make less than $43,450 annually.

Workers spoke

Sensing an unfavorable outcome, public comment on Thursday was more poignant.

DPS data analyst Aimee Toney told the Board she felt “utterly deflated and backed into a corner” as she pointed out that the proposals to revert to old salaries with a flat raise did nothing to alleviate wage compression, which was a consistently-stated purpose of the now-discarded HIL study compensation plan.

Barbara Tapper, a physical therapist for 25 years in the district, echoed concerns about how the proposals before the Board ignored wage compression. She also chastised the district for failing to meet with County officials this week.

Hub Farm educator and classified worker Hannah Ball-Damberg lamented the same points and pointed out that County Commission Vice Chair Nimasheena Burns issued a clear statement that moving the Joint Meeting was unacceptable.

Ball-Damberg emphatically closed her statement with a warning to the Board: “If you choose this hasty, insufficient and deeply harmful option, you are throwing out… any chance at repairing the trust and morale with all 5,000 of us DPS employees.”

For others, it was crystal clear that trust of the School Board had already been broken beyond repair.

DPS parent Girija Mahajan openly challenged the Board, warning, “If you vote for wage cuts for thousands of public sector workers tonight, I dare you to call yourself a progressive in this community again.”

DPS parent and Brogden Middle PTA Treasurer Pete Crawford directly told the entire School Board to resign. Waldo Fenner, DPS substitute teacher and longtime Durhamite, was the final speaker and elicited a mix of cheers and laughs when he stated he believes the Board should be arrested and put in jail since they had no intention to pay their workers.

The Vote

Despite the sentiment in the room from workers and their allies, the vote carried by a 5-2 margin on Thursday night. Board Chair Bettina Umstead and veteran-most member Natalie Beyer were the most unwavering in their vote. The proposal was on its third presentation in the month; this time Jessica Carda-Auten, Jovonia Lewis and Millicient Rogers joined the majority, while Vice Chair Emily Chavez and Alexandra Valladares made up the pair of dissenting votes.

On February 2 Umstead and Beyer were the first to vote for decreasing worker wages in a 2-5 vote and then, in another failed attempt, were joined by Jovonia Lewis in a 3-4 vote on February 8. (A special report released earlier this month by the Board attorneys identified that Umstead and Beyer had uniquely acquired foreknowledge of the budget problems in December 2023.)

This was also the first Board meeting for new Interim Superintendent Catty Moore, and her firm recommendation to repeal the salaries granted in October 2023 appeared to add the necessary support to pass the measure.

The Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People issued a statement on Monday in support of paying workers at their previously promised salaries and called on the County Commission to step in to secure funding if necessary. The People’s Alliance, the other major Political Action Committee special interest group in Durham, has thus far been silent on the issue outside of reposting a Durham Association of Educators’ post on Twitter and Facebook on January 25.

All seven sitting Board members were endorsed by the People’s Alliance. Only two members (Lewis and Valladares) were endorsed by the DCABP in their most recent elections.

The financial situation

Thursday’s meeting also brought forth new financial confusion. The public was told the district still is not clear how much over budget payments to workers have been to date.

The compensation plan implemented in October 2023 was initially announced and budgeted to cost $10.8 million, and DPS sent notification of salary adjustments to at least 1,875 classified staff in October 2023. Failures by DPS Finance and Human Resources caused the estimated annual cost to swell to what DPS had reported to be around $20 million to continue to pay workers this fiscal year at the rates promised.

At previous meetings in January and February, the Board authorized stopgap funding so workers could continue to receive their promised pay through February. On Thursday evening the public learned that the previously stated cost estimate of that stopgap funding ($700,000 per month) neglected to include non-salaried hourly workers who also received pay increases—which adds a previously unaccounted for $300,000 per month.

It is unclear how DPS tracks ongoing expenses given that, at this stage of the six-week crisis, fundamental data points are still not well-established. MS-DOS based software (hyperlinked for our GenZ and young Millennial readers) has been discussed at recent Board meetings.

On Thursday evening DPS administration acknowledged that over $6 million currently sits in the district’s fund balance—the accumulation of unspent funds or unbudgeted revenues. Unlike our neighbors in Wake County and Orange County, Durham County and DPS do not appear to have a formal written policy about how to handle fund balance at the school district.

DPS staff have repeatedly stated that “best practice” is to maintain 8% of the operating budget in fund balance. Wake County Public School System policy states the district must give back anything over 6% to the County. Orange County sets a target of 5.5% for their school districts. Durham County Commissioners have repeatedly told the School Board not to maintain balances in the fund balance.

Discussion on Thursday night included conversations about desiring to hold onto fund balance for a “rainy day” or a potential emergency that could transpire, ostensibly not viewing the current situation as an “emergency.”

Since budget errors by DPS administration became public on January 12, the following events have occurred at the district:

• Resignation of the Chief Financial Officer

• Resignation of the Superintendent

• Multiple days of widespread school bus shortages due to worker absences

• Multiple district-wide cancellations of school days due to worker absences

• Over 1800 workers living nearly six weeks under constant uncertainty about their wages

• A series of nine (9) School Board meetings during a period of time when only three (3) were scheduled

• Instant policy changes to require more stringent Board oversight of contracts

• Multiple press conferences to extend updates to the public.

It is unclear what type of worse weather phenomenon the district is waiting for to use their “rainy day” fund.

Despite calls from PACs, parents and workers for the School Board to meet with the County Commission to discuss the potential for stopgap funding and broach the likelihood of continuing funding for FY24-25, the School Board took their vote on this issue after skipping the regularly scheduled Joint Meeting with the County Commissioners that was supposed to happen this past Tuesday morning.

What’s next?

State law does apparently require advance notice of 30 days before changing a state worker’s salary, but it was unclear from Thursday’s meeting if the Board expects new salaries to be enacted in the March or April pay period. Veteran employees will see the biggest loss in salary, while newer hires with little work experience are expected to experience increases.

Workers are being told the Thursday salary repeal is a measure to secure the budget for the remainder of the year, and that it will be paired with the adoption of a new compensation plan. The part-time consulting comptroller has offered to build a new compensation plan within the next month, but that plan is not anticipated to solicit input from workers. By comparison, the HIL study interviewed about 70 staff across pay grades and job descriptions.

The consulting comptroller and the HIL consultants both have discussed that if districts do not have enough funding to fully implement a compensation study, they recommend a phased approach to implementation. No School Board members discussed the possibility of phasing, and the language in the option that was voted into action Thursday night explicitly calls for the elimination of the HIL compensation schedules.

It is unclear at this time how much employee input will be sought—especially after employee comment at the meeting was largely ignored. Either way, significant additional ongoing funding would be required in FY24-25 to bring classified workers back towards the salaries they have held the last several months.

And the FY24-25 budget presentation was the agenda item immediately following the Thursday night salary vote. The Interim Superintendent discussed the classified compensation item for less than 20 seconds in her over 18-minute budget presentation.

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. Some local news outlets reported rather misleading headlines/photo choices and others added unclear content, so BCPI published this piece as a point-in-time piece from a non-revenue outlet. Mary Helen Moore’s piece in the Herald Sun was quite thorough and well-reported.