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At the special called budget meeting, the Hamblen County School Board approved salary increases for all staff in the district and the addition of several staff positions.

At the work session before the meeting Superintendent Arnold Bunch broke down the budget for school board members and explained the goals for the next few years.

Bunch began by discussing a teacher salary increase that coincides with the state’s approved increase.

“The governor passed a proposed increase in teacher pay and that has already been signed and passed,” Bunch said. “It won’t go into effect until July 1, but teachers can expect a gradual increase each year. The goal is to get to a starting base salary of $50,000 by 2027.

“Currently where the rest of the state is at $40,000 we are already at $41,776. What that means is we are above the state minimum and what we are building our strategy to do is remain above the state minimum so when we get to 2027 we remain a preferred employer for those looking to become teachers.”

Bunch further explained the county’s current pay scale, which includes a $1,800 pay increase after a teacher’s first year.

“With our current pay scale a new teacher that comes to our district will be paid $41,776,” he said. “After one year their jump on the pay scale is $1,800. However, we need to keep in mind the 5% increase each year, so that may lower that amount to $1,500.

“We are working to find the right methodology to end up in 2027 somewhere around $52,000 as our base starting salary.”

Teachers are not the only staff members that can look forward to a raise, the board will award pay increases to the entire district.

“We have a proposed 5% salary increase for all the staff in the district,” he said. “We originally proposed a 4% increase but after further discussion with Principals and staff we believe this is a better number.”

Substitutes and school psychologists within the district can also anticipate an increase in pay.

“We will also increase substitute pay,” he said. “That was a shortfall that we had in our district, that we were not paying our subs enough compared to other surrounding counties.

“We have had trouble keeping school psychologists and we believe that is due to pay because we live in a very competitive area. We have adjusted the pay scale for them because they have increased education they must complete, and we have also bumped up their starting pay.

“We have raised pay for those positions to make us more competitive when it comes to hiring and filling those positions.”

Bunch then began to explain the different new positions that the district will work to fill in the upcoming year.

As the district continues to maintain security at each school, it will add 17 new security officers to keep the schools safe.

“We are going to add 17 security officer positions at this time,” he said. “When we add those we will have a total of 20 throughout the district.”

“Were going to add a security officer supervisor that will ensure each officer is up to date with their training and teaching them how to do exercises.”

Helping students learn English is also a priority for the board as it will add more English second learning teachers to the district.

“We have added additional English second learning teacher positions and an English second learning coordinator position,” Bunch said. “As we looked at other schools who have the best program in the state, Metro Nashville had the best program and they had a coordinator who ensured all ESL teachers were on the same page and giving students the best help and that’s what we modeled our program after.”

Another addition is supplemental sports staff to help coaches maintain their teams.

“Currently we have no supplement coaches or Junior Varsity coaches for our middle school teams and what we found out was most of the head coaches were paying the JV coaches out of their own pockets,” he said. “So we included additional coaches in this budget.”

See upcoming editions of the Citizen Tribune for more Hamblen County School Board budget coverage.