Maryville City Schools may raise starting teacher pay to $50,750

Maryville City Schools may raise starting teacher pay to $50,750 in the 2024-25 school year, under a plan presented at a school board budget retreat Friday, April 12.

MCS Director Mike Winstead explained the plan to distribute a 3.5% pay increase “strategically” to the Maryville Board of Education during its meeting at the Blount Partnership.

The plan would raise by 6% the starting pay for a teacher with a bachelor’s degree and no experience, from $47,851 this school year. Applying the same dollar amount increase across the bachelor’s degree category would see teachers at the top of that list receiving a 4.2% raise.

For teachers with more advanced degrees, their raises would range from 4% to 2.6% at the top of the salary scale, Winstead explained.

The draft budget would give employees without teaching certification a raise of 50 cents an hour. That would raise starting pay for positions including cafeteria cashier and teaching assistant to over $16 an hour.

Current estimates put MCS revenues up by about $2 million next year, and Winstead said all of that would go to salaries and benefits. “We are, in a big way, investing in our people with this budget, strategically,” the director said, adding that next year he hopes MCS can give the same percentage increase in salaries across the board.

To cover other increased costs, such as a proposed 10% increase on its school bus contract, the district would look for cuts in other areas of the budget, such as capital projects.

Rankings

Winstead explained while the district has long had a goal to be ranked among the top 10 districts in the state on pay, it’s currently 18th on starting pay and 16th at the top of its salary scale for teachers only with a bachelor’s degree.

“When that state law was passed that we need to get to 50,000 by 2026-27, Alcoa (City Schools) was the first to do it, a couple years ago, and then nine more districts joined them last year,” Winstead said. “So 10 districts total now start over $50,000. A lot of those are city districts.”

Board members also said that the district’s health benefits and culture make it an attractive place to work as well. Winstead agreed and said, “but we want to pay our teachers the way they ought to be paid,” and that’s why the goal has been to be among the top 10 in the state on pay.

The Blount County Board of Education has approved a budget that would increase its starting teacher pay to $50,000 in the next school year, but that budget has a nearly $4 million shortfall in revenue.

MCS will continue to update its draft budget with new revenue estimates before voting on its plan for 2024-25 next month.

Funding

More than $1.1 million of the increased revenue the district is expecting is from the state funding formula for schools.

During the review of revenues Friday, board member Nick Black remarked, “That city allocation seems to be pretty stagnant still.”

The MCS budget projection includes nearly $11.9 million from its share of county property tax revenue, $14.1 million from local sales tax dollars and a $9.4 million allocation from the city of Maryville.

Winstead said the city allocation was flat from 2008 to 2019, when it received a bump to the current amount.

While the allocation is not specifically tied to city property taxes, board member Isaac Simerly said the schools’ share of that revenue has fallen from about 50% to less than 30%. “The city is not keeping up its commitment to the schools,” he said.

Later, Simerly also said the district has added 800 students since 2008.

The city of Maryville budget notes that it pays debt service for major school capital projects as well as the cost of school resource officers.

Since fiscal 2016, MCS funding from the local option sales tax has about doubled, to a projected $14.1 million next year.