After almost two decades at the same rates, lawyers who do work for the East Baton Rouge Parish school system are in line to get a pay boost, bringing their rates in line with those recommended by the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office.
The parish School Board on Thursday voted unanimously to recommend increasing the rate from a maximum of $175 an hour to $225 an hour. The board is expected to formally approve the rate increase when it meets again on Feb. 16.
The current rates of pay were approved in 2003.
“We’ve continued to pay them at the old rate for almost 20 years,” Gwynn Shamlin, general counsel for the school system, told the board Thursday.
Shamlin said the new rate was the product of lengthy discussions between him and the heads of the two law firms that handle the bulk of work for the school system, which is home to more than 40,000 children: Hammonds Sills Adkins Guice Noah & Perking LLP and Phelps Dunbar LLP.
“We are a very large district, a very complex district with a number of needs,” Shamlin said.
Certain Phelps Dunbar attorneys are in line to make even more, $300 an hour, if they practice specialized areas. The resolution gives some examples of the areas of the law where attorneys could command the $300 rate: “strategic education law advice and counseling, business transactions and litigation, board member and officer liability litigation, errors and omissions litigation and employment practices liability litigation.”
The Attorney General’s Office legal rate recommendations change over time. When those recommended rates increase in the future, the School Board won’t automatically pay those higher rates. Instead, the board would have to vote again setting those higher rates in its policy.
Also on Thursday, the School Board recommended new one-time stipends:
- $2,500 for new special education teachers. Twenty teachers are eligible, all hired between late May and the end of January.
- $1,000 for all English as a Second Language, or ESL, teachers. A total of 81 teachers are eligible.
Nichola Hall, head of human resources, said the first stipend is part of a voluntary compliance plan the school system entered into a year ago with state regulators probing problems the preceding fall at the EBR Virtual Academy.