A budget standoff between Montgomery County schools and the County Council has put a modest teacher pay raise on the line at the same time as proposed salaries for some top-level administrators are nearly 20 percent higher than this year’s take.
According to the school board’s proposed budget, reviewed at Monday night’s school board meeting, teachers would receive a 5 percent cost-of-living increase. According to some Council members, scaling the increase back to 3 percent would get the district $28 million closer to meeting the $51 million in reductions recommended in the county executive’s 2009 budget proposal. Two-thirds of the teachers are also scheduled for raises of almost 4 percent based on experience.
Salaries proposed by the board for almost 12,000 teaching and support positions in 2009 total almost $869.6 million, up 4 percent from $833.6 million in 2008. But six administrators in Superintendent Jerry Weast and the board’s offices are slated to see salaries soar by 19 percent to a total of nearly $955,000 in 2009, up from about $804,000 in 2008. In the office of the deputy superintendent, total salaries and wages would increase by 15 percent to about $2.1 million for 14 administrative positions.
“Symbolically it might bother some people, but were you to zero out the positions, it would be negligible,” board member Steve Abrams said. “The No. 1 issue is to make sure that [early childhood and middle school] reforms that have been successful, and that are resource-sensitive, are maintained.”
The superintendent and the board have refused to budge on reductions, citing firm commitment to union contracts negotiated last year through 2010.
“The school system made those commitments, the County Council did not,” said Councilman Phil Andrews, who sits on the Education Committee. Reductions in salary increases, he said, would be the fairest way to ensure county taxpayers don’t take on the entire burden of the crumbling economy.
Regarding the larger wage increases for top-level administrators, Andrews said, “I don’t see any reason why there should not be a more significant reduction for increases in excess of the average.”
