Charleston County’s school superintendent is recommending a more-than 10 percent pay increase so all teachers starting at Charleston County School District would earn at least $50,000.
“I have been listening to teachers since I’ve been back in the district, since 2018,” Charleston County Superintendent Don Kennedy said at a May 2 press conference. “When I came back here in 2018 as [chief financial officer] and started working on the budget for fiscal year 2019, I began to look at the financial realities and what we could do and … developed a three-year plan to increase teacher salaries from $36,000 to $40,000. Obviously, that is not enough to support our teachers in this expensive place called Charleston.”
Under the district’s current pay scale, a teacher with a bachelor’s degree would need 22 years of experience to afford a home in Charleston County, according to a March 13 presentation by the Charleston County School District (CCSD) teacher pay task force.
Kennedy’s proposal follows similar measures in school districts across the Lowcountry to help bolster teacher recruitment and retention.
“This is definitely designed to recruit and retain teachers,” he said. “It’s not just for across-the-board. This is a step on an incremental approach. We recognize recruiting is a big problem, so the teacher salary schedule we propose is heavy in the first four years to entice people to come into the teaching profession. It becomes heavy also in the middle part of a teacher’s career to entice them to remain in the profession.”
Kennedy said the district has a clear path to attain that goal. Relying on state revenue, reductions in other expenditures in the district and through a local millage increase in county taxes. Kennedy specifically recommended county leaders pass a local 7.1 millage increase. The county passed a 6.3 millage increase last year.
The proposed bump would increase the taxes paid on rental and non-primary homes, commercial property and vehicles. For a home valued at $435,000, taxpayers would pay an additional $185.31 per year, which is about $15.40 per month. Altogether, the increase would bring in an additional $23.1 million.
The proposed teacher salary increase alone, however, brings $31 million in new expenses. Combined with other additional expenses including increased retirement benefits, higher salaries for data clerks, paid parental leave and charter school funding, expanded learning services, hiring additional employees and more — new expenditures total about $73 million.
“There’s lots and lots of numbers,” Kennedy said. “There are realities we have to deal with. We have certain expenditures — teacher salaries is an example — the taxpayers have to be sensitive to. We want to make sure we’re representing both taxpayers and our teachers with what the school board has to deliberate on.”
The district is making several cuts and reductions in the budget to make up the difference, Kennedy said. The district is getting rid of $8 million in “departmental positions,” which have been vacant. A hiring freeze levied in April will save the district about $2.7 million. The rest will come from a combination of drawing from the fund balance from last year, essentially the district’s emergency fund account.
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