April 2023 school board update

The FCCPS school board addressed several important topics in April including the recent compensation study, changes to extra pay for extra duties, and how the schools use early dismissal Wednesdays. 

Compensation Study

You can find video of the presentation here, a pdf of the presentation here, and the board’s discussion of the presentation here. 

Study highlights:

• Current teacher pay scales above the bachelor’s pay lane tend to be under the market average for early- and late-career teachers and above the market average for mid-career teachers. The bachelor’s pay lane tends to be below the market average. About 93% of teaching staff are in the pay lanes above the bachelor’s pay lane.

• Non-teacher pay scales tended to be below the market average

• Proposed teacher pay scales smooth out the salary growth paths and are right around the market average

• Average salary increase for teachers if pay scales are implemented would be 4.6%

• Non-teacher positions would see the largest increases, particularly for day care, maintenance, student support, food service, and transportation workers

• Implementation of the pay scales would not result in any decrease in pay for current staff

• Implementation of the proposed teacher and non-teacher pay scales would be about $1.04 million each, for a total of $2.1 million

Given that the proposed pay scales are getting the positions closer to market average, the average pay raise does mask significant variation in pay raises (particularly among teaching staff). The board was provided with information about the distribution of raises among teaching staff, which you can find here. About 20% of teaching staff would see less than a 2% increase in pay for next year. Implementation of the teacher pay scales would, however, entail an increase in career earnings.

Extra Pay for Extra Duties

You can find video of the presentation here and a pdf here.

Extra pay for extra duties (EPED) refers to those accepted responsibilities that fall outside of the instructional day and outside of the scope of the primary position, e.g. club staff sponsor, coach, etc. These are split into VHSL athletics and activities positions and school-based positions. The staff endeavored to provide regionally competitive pay for these duties and provide pay standardization across similar activities. You can find the sports EPED pay amounts here and the school-based pay amounts here.

Early-release Wednesdays

You can find the video of the presentation here, the presentation pdf here, and the discussion starts here. Over time the board has received feedback from the community about the difficulty that early-release Wednesdays pose to some families, especially those families with young kids whose parents work outside the home. This presentation was requested by the board as part of an exploration into potentially changing the current early-release Wednesday schedule. This was an informational session, and any changes to the schedule will not be considered until, at the earliest, later this fall. 

• The principals from each school provided the board with an overview of the ways in which early-dismissal Wednesdays are used.

• Early release Wednesdays are used for professional development, planning time, etc.

• The secondary campus has 1 early-release Wednesday every month

• The primary schools have 26 early release Wednesdays throughout the year

• This year’s primary schedule includes a built in block of common planning time for each grade

• The common planning time at the middle school is organized by grade level, so early-release Wednesdays are used, in part, as departmental (e.g. history and math) planning time.

• The common planning time at the middle school is organized by department, so early-release Wednesdays are used, in part, as grade level planning time that allows a focus on individual students.

• For more detail, checkout the presentation and discussion.

As always, if you wish to contact the board, email us at schoolboard@fccps.org.