Employees at the Fort Worth school district may be getting a pay raise next year.
The nine-member school board is meeting on Tuesday and trustees are scheduled to discuss a proposal to give workers a salary boost. Watch it online Tuesday here.
School district officials are creating budget priorities as they work to develop the spending plan for the 2013-2014 fiscal year.
Administrators are recommending that changes to pay be handled this way:
First, the district could roll a one-time, one percent payment employees were given for the 2012-2013 school year into the salary scale for next year. Then the district could add an additional 2 percent increase to salaries on top of that. The pay raises would cost $9.7 million, with funds coming from the district's general fund.
In pre-meeting documents, trustees were told:
"Due to the reductions in funding, the district was unable to increase salaries for employees over the last two years. This has diminished the District's capacity to attract and retain high quality staff. Therefore, the priority for 2013-2014 is to increase employee salaries to be more competitive."
Another proposed budget priority is to keep the maintenance and operations portion of the tax rate the same. That portion of the tax rate, which pays for the day to day operations of the district is 1.04 per $100 of assessed property value, the highest Texas districts can go without additional voter approval. Combined with the portion for debt repayment, the total tax rate is $1.322, which has remained unchanged since 2009.
Administrators are also recommending that the fund balance in the general fund be maintained at $70 million.
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