CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas —
CCISD school board members met last week to discuss district-wide pay increases.
At the specially called district meeting, board members discussed two different pay increase options for educators and all other employees.
Option one would be all employees getting to a two percent based on the midpoint.
“Option two kind of deals with the compression issue,” said deputy superintendent of business and support services, Karen Griffith. “We do it based on years of service. One to five years would get one percent, six to would get two percent, and your 13 plus (years) would get three percent."
For that second option, Griffith says that for teachers, nurses and librarians, pay increase options would be based on their salary schedule.
For all other employees, that increase would be based on their years with the district
"Because new people that are coming in are getting a higher rate than those who have been here the longest, so we are rewarding the employees that have been here the longest with CCISD by giving them a larger percentage to help with that compression gap," she said.
During the meeting school board president, Don Clark said the money for the raises would be coming out of the district's general fund balance, leaving no other place to pull the money from.
"We don't know what the state is going to give. We don't know what the assessed values are going to be, so the money for this raise comes out of fund balance, and if nothing happens for two years, we have to keep continuing to pull money out of fund balance," Clark said.
According to a school funding advocacy group, Raise Your Hand Texas, if the state increased the basic allotment, or per-student funding, that would address Texas districts' issues with inflation and help fund teacher raises.
Basic allotment for public school spending hasn't increased in Texas since 2019. The state also ranks in the bottom 10 states in funding.
“The school districts are running on a shoestring right now and that's how we're running it in our houses right now. We're struggling. Why should we be struggling when our parent state has billions of dollars. It doesn't make sense," Dr. Nancy Vera, President of the Corpus Christi chapter of the American Federation of Teachers said.
It's important to note that a decision has not been made yet, as there is a workshop planned in the coming weeks to come to a decision.