June 7, 2024
By: Dwayne Page
The DeKalb County Board of Education may have to cough up more money on its own to fully fund its proposed pay raises for school employees.
During Thursday night’s meeting, the budget committee vote 4-1 to take back a portion of what it had voted on Tuesday night to give schools in new local money for the 2024-25 fiscal year subject to final approval of the full county commission. Voting in favor were Chairman Jeff Barnes, and members Glynn Merriman, Tom Chandler, and Sabrina Farler. Member Tony (Cully) Culwell voted against the move. Two members, Mathias Anderson and Susannah Cripps were absent
While the proposed 10 cent property tax increase for schools as recommended by the budget committee Tuesday night was left in place, which would generate $620,000 in new money for schools, the committee basically rescinded the move it made Tuesday allocating schools another $370,000 from the local purpose (sales tax) fund.
Budget committee member Glynn Merriman, who made the motion, said his reason was essentially that he believes the school board still has a healthy fund balance or reserves of up to $10 million from which the proposed pay raises could be funded for at least one year and that the board of education had not asked for any specific amount of new local money in its proposed budget. Since the local purpose (sales tax) fund is also used partly to support school debt service, Merriman said that the $370,000 should be left in that account to go toward future planning of a school building program.
Schools already get an annual contribution from the county’s local purpose fund of $1,540,000 for yearly school budget operation. The extra $370,000 would have put the annual contribution from the local purpose (sales tax) fund for schools at $1,910,000. Even with the added funds of $620,000 from the proposed 10 cent tax increase, the school budget would apparently still be about $1.1 million short of fully funding the $1.72 million cost of the pay raises with matching benefits as presented to the budget committee last week by Director of Schools Patrick Cripps. However, the difference could possibly be made up from the school budget’s reserves.
According to the proposed school budget, as adopted by the board of education last month, a $2,000 pay increase would go to school employees with up to 9 years of service (155 employees); $5,000 for those with 10-19 years (104 employees); and $6,000 to staff with 20 or more years (108 employees).