Correction: This article has been corrected. In the original story, The Washington Examiner incorrectly reported which school employees were earning $104,000 a year.
Montgomery County officials on Tuesday lamented a growing disparity between mounting paychecks for school employees and the rest of the taxpayer-funded workforce.
In agreements with public employees unions, County Executive Ike Leggett has proposed a one-time, $2,000 lump sum payment for most county employees — a move County Council members say they support.
| Also in Montgomery |
| The Montgomery County Council passed legislation limiting the authority of County Executive Ike Leggett to sell or lease public property. |
| The move comes after a series of decisions by executive officials in which county lawmakers disagreed or said they weren’t fully briefed on the details of the purchases. Now the council has the power to approve disposition of public property before the deals are finalized. |
| “This is not about anyone’s integrity,” said Council President Roger Berliner, D-Bethesda/Potomac. “This is about checks and balances, and it will make the disposal of county assets a more collective, collaborative process.” |
| However, three dissenting council members said the measure undermines Leggett’s ability to govern. |
| “This bill insults the integrity of executive branch staff by suggesting that [their] work is not intended to serve the best interests of the county; it is a solution in search of a problem,” said Council members Valerie Ervin, Nancy Floreen and Craig Rice in a joint statement. |
However, the county’s nationally recognized public school system is taking a different approach. School officials are projecting a 3.2 percent raise for employees through step and cost of living increases.
Put another way: The school system is planning on spending roughly $14 million more on salaries than if it pushed the blueprint preferred by Leggett and the council.
Council members don’t control how the school system spends its money, but some dismissed the push for permanent raises as foolhardy.
A former school teacher, Councilman Marc Elrich, D-at large, called the move “premature” and said he worried school officials were “creating a situation where they aren’t going to be able to do things in the classroom” because of the obligations to workers’ benefits.
“Our other employees are ticked about this,” he said. “They’ve worked just as hard. In tough times, all workers should equally sacrifice and benefit in similar ways.”
Even before the expected raises, the average annual salary for 360 employees listed as “other professionals,”12-month employees including school psychologists and instructional specialists, is $104,431, according to county data.
And by raising school employees’ base salaries, the system would increase the county’s pension commitments in future years. Already, the schools are the lone system in the Maryland teachers pension system with a county-funded pension supplement, which will cost roughly $30 million next fiscal year — more than the entire budget for libraries.
The county’s top elected official said school officials should pay more attention to the county’s tenuous financial standing when bargaining with union leaders.
“I hope that all agencies would do similarly to what the rest of the government is doing,” Leggett said. “I just think that given what we saw for the future and what we see now, that is the better approach.”
Yet school officials say they have fallen well within spending guidelines recently and that better compensation packages are needed to attract top talent in an increasingly competitive scramble for teachers in the Washington region.
“I don’t think it’s a reasonable goal to seek parity across the board,” said Doug Prouty, president of the county teachers union. “In addition, there’s some pressures on public educators that are different than other employees.”
