Fairfax County teachers are fighting the school board that promised them raises after two years of pay freezes, but is now exploring other ways to spend federal stimulus funding.
By Oct. 1, Fairfax is scheduled to receive $21.3 million, the largest slice of the $249.5 million that the Education Jobs Fund allocated to Virginia.
“The primary purpose of the Education Jobs Fund legislation is to provide additional funding to states for the support of local teacher [and other school-level personnel] salary and related costs,” Virginia Superintendent of Public Instruction Patricia Wright said.
Fairfax teachers have not received any pay raises since fiscal 2009; in the past two years, the budget has been slashed by $52.5 million to $2.2 billion, even as enrollment has ballooned by 7,000 students.
In the fiscal 2011 budget, the school board said it had “committed itself to compensation increases for [fiscal] 2012.”
But the board could not confirm the raises, because booming enrollment may divert the funds to the hiring of new teachers.
“Teachers would not want to see class sizes increase so much and all other programs be stripped in order to eke out large pay raises,” school board member Janie Strauss said. “The community also has expectations of what we’re going to teach, how many kids are in each class.”
Michael Hairston, president of the Fairfax Education Association, said that while he understood that other programs had taken hits during the budget cuts, “This is employee time.”
“Morale is low, the workload has increased, and this money was designed to give folks relief,” Hairston said.
Pay raises were still a priority for the board, Strauss said: “We care about our teachers because they’re fabulous, and we’re nervous about going too long without paying them.”
Steven Greenburg, president of the Fairfax County Federation of Teachers, said that stress-related incidents had increased among teachers, some of whom have taken second jobs. “Teachers are giving people who spend a lot of hours outside
of the classroom. If your time outside of the classroom is no longer available because of a second job, that will have an impact in the classroom,” Greenburg said.
The school board will discuss the funds in an Oct. 13 work session.
It would cost $17.9 million to reimburse teachers for a year of cost-of-living increases and $40 million to reinstate pay scale raises.
Teacher salary starts at $44,000 and can reach $98,541.
