By Richard Sullins | richard@rantnc.com

If Lee County’s commissioners thought the holiday break would discourage a group of school support staff from continuing to push for raises and other changes in their status, they would have been disappointed Monday by the sight of two more support staff appearing for the third straight month in pursuit of help from a group of county leaders they see as being dismissive of their pleas.

But as Republican County Commission Vice Chair Dr. Andre Knecht said, “it’s complicated.”

And that’s the main reason this group of school support workers, known as “classified staff,” seems to be getting ping-ponged back and forth between the commissioners and the school board as they search for someone to step forward and take ownership of the issue – and steps to resolve it.

Emily York, an instructional support assistant at East Lee Middle School, made use of the three-minute public comment period provided at commissioner meetings to once more press the board for a classified staff raise for the first time since 2008.

York told the commissioners “I have a son who just turned 16 and during his entire lifetime, the people that I work with as classified staff in Lee County Schools have not gotten a raise in their take home pay. Not even a penny. Think about that for a minute. How many of you would feel like a valued employee if you worked for a company that didn’t give you a raise for 16 years?”

What it’s all about

The “classified” employees that have been showing up at meetings of the commissioners and the school board for the past several months aren’t required by the state to be certified in order to be employed, a category that includes instructional assistants, library and office staff, maintenance and custodial workers, bus drivers, and others.

But these employees only work when schools are open, which is 10 months a year. Their actual monthly salary of $2,395.50 spread over those 10 months when they are working amounts to a pre-tax amount of $23,955 per year. If you were to assume that this employee supports two other persons living at home, that family would be living below the federal poverty level, now standing at $25,820 per year.

Numbers like that mean that employees who love their jobs working with students, and who know that they could get a higher paying job working in the private sector, may not be able to stay where their heart is.

York said “with that kind of salary, many of us would have to quit and find a new job. We could work fast food and make more money. Some of us have our teenage children coming home with bigger checks.”

Hundreds of the county’s classified school employees find themselves having to work a second, third, or even a fourth job just to keep their heads above water, seeing their buying power eaten away by inflation, and going without an increase in their pay for the last 16 years.

The Lee County Board of Education chose to freeze salaries for its classified employees when the Great Recession arrived in 2008, and it seems that it never revisited the notion of any salary adjustments that might keep pace with the percentages that were slowly being granted to teachers in the years since then.

The ping pong effect

Both commissioners and school board members have lavished praise on the classified staff employees who come to their meetings to show solidarity on the issues they are bringing to the forefront. Republican Commissioner Taylor Vorbeck said “I want to thank you for coming up here,” and Democratic Commissioner Mark Lovick echoed those sentiments.

“Thank you all for coming,” he said. “Let’s keep those avenues open.”

But those sentiments have been expressed each time a representative of the group has spoken, along with a statement from County Manager Lisa Minter clarifying that while the county provides millions each year in support of public education, it doesn’t have the authority to tell the school board how to spend those dollars. Minter has stressed each time that it’s the county’s board of education that has the final say on how those dollars are spent.

“This board is not responsible for the school board’s failure to grant those raises,” she said.

As she has twice before, Minter suggested the group go back to the school board and make their case there.

In the current 2024-25 fiscal year, the county provided an additional $2 million to the school board to spend as they saw fit. Of that amount, $700,000 was earmarked for capital projects, but the remaining $1.3 million was provided to the board to spend at its discretion. In recent years, the commissioners have opted not to provide the entire amount requested by the school board, but instead given it a portion of what was requested and given them the freedom to decide where it was needed most.

All this took place in June, July, and August of 2024.

At the school board’s November meeting, the group asked for a response to their demands for salary adjustments within 30 days. Dossenbach said his staff had already been working on a proposal and he hoped to return to the December meeting with one for the board to consider.

On December 10, Dossenbach’s plan to phase in salary adjustments for its classified staff employees was presented to the school board. It proposed to use $709,000 – one fourth of the amount needed to raise the salaries – and get those dollars from district funds and cost savings from a reorganization of the central office.

The remaining $2.1 million would have to come from the county, a reality the superintendent promised to include in the district’s budget request for FY 2025-26. A resolution adopted unanimously adopted by the school board on December 10 says dryly that “this plan will require a commitment from the Lee County Board of Commissioners to provide funding.”

And that’s where this group of employees feel they’re being treated like a ping pong ball, with neither governing board wanting to step in and do what is needed to help them.

Where the rubber might meet the road

But there’s another reality, one unspoken in the public forums where these employees keep showing up. What would happen if all of these employees didn’t show up for work one day?

There’s an easy answer to that question. The county’s 17 public schools would be paralyzed without bus drivers, administrative staff, cafeteria workers, and teachers’ assistants. Students would have to remain home, many parents would have to find daycare for their children, teachers would become even more frazzled than they already are.

In North Carolina, there are no unions for school employees to join, and state law makes a walk out illegal. But the fact remains that this group of people – hundreds of them – are going to be a force to be reckoned with. Their primary spokesperson, April Stone, made that clear when she spoke to the school board back in December, expressing thanks for the coming raises but also making clear that they are not going to back down.

“I want to say that this proposal isn’t what we had hoped for, but I also want to say that we deserve it,” she said at the time. “We have deserved it for 15 years. It’s a step in the right direction, a step in good faith. But it’s also a slap in the face. I hope we can continue to move forward, but I also want you to know how disappointed we are.”

The commissioners are convening Friday to set their goals for the coming fiscal year. It’s likely they’ll fewer dollars to pay for expansion items in the budget than they currently do. If something new gets added, something else must be cut. The current year’s budget stands at $115 million, and it’s reasonable to expect some additional revenues through growth and sales tax receipts. But growth alone won’t be enough to give everyone what they want. The final decisions will be up to the commissioners, and the process of building next year’s budget got started before the holiday break.

So, hard decisions are on the horizon for issues like this one. But at least one commissioner believes it’s time for the ping pong game to end. Democratic Commissioner Robert Reives Sr., who has been on the board for more than 30 years, said someone needs to to stop the back and forth and solve the problem.

“This issue is getting out of hand. It really needs to be worked out,” he said. “There are too many people misunderstanding our role after the funding and that needs to be corrected.”

It seems that there is, in fact, a lot of misunderstanding going on, and the sort of collaboration that it would take to resolve this matter just isn’t forthcoming. York summed it all up in just a couple of sentences.

“We told the School Board and the County Commissioners what we needed to say,” she said. “They aren’t listening.”