Some Bay District School employees may get a pay raise soon

PANAMA CITY, Fla. ( WMBB ) — Bay County School Superintendent Mark McQueen is asking school board members to consider the district’s pay scale.

He says addressing salary discrepancies is long overdue.

“I could clearly see that we had an inequity in our pay system when 70% of our employees, who are non-instructional, are making $15 an hour. That’s a massive amount of compression that’s taken place,” McQueen said.

The district hired Evergreen Solutions to evaluate employee salaries. The preliminary results show certain staff members are adequately compensated for their work.

“Our teachers are getting exactly where they need to be right now, although that always is a moving target. Right now, our teachers on average start at 1.2% higher than their peer school systems that were considered in the study,” McQueen said.

The study also indicates other employees are significantly underpaid.

“Where we found shortfalls was in the support personnel anywhere from 23% to 28% short of what they can make in other peer schools. Similarly for our administrators, they’re up to 32% to 35% less than what peer administrators are making at other school systems,” McQueen said.

McQueen said the study helped define the problem. Now it’s up to the school board to come up with a solution.

“The next steps are building those salary schedules, seeing how we can implement those, seeing what the budget is able to support, and be able to make sure that we’re properly compensating our employees, our instructional teammates, our support personnel, as well as our administrative personnel. It takes all of them to be able to put the ‘a’ back in Bay,” McQueen said.

McQueen said the entire study should be completed by the beginning of June.

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