Knox County leaders approve historic salary investment for educators and staff

The Knox County School (KCS) Board approved a historic $39 million investment to raise the salaries of teachers and school staff across the district.The vote was a unanimous 8-0 with board member Jennifer Owens recusing herself from the vote, stating she plans to return to teaching after serving on the school board.“There are few things that are easier yeses for me than this,” said vice board chair Steve Triplett.Under the new salary, district staff will receive pay at market value. The new salaries will be implemented starting next school year and come following a compensation study completed by the district.President of the Knox County Education Association (KCEA) Paula Hancock told board members that it’s important to close the gap on teacher pay penalty and that the KCEA is advocating for improved salary structure and increases.“While the teacher shortage is being felt across many states and school districts, the most critical resource denied to our students is an experienced, certified teacher. An acute deficit that threatens our students’ ability to learn but it also reduces teacher effectiveness, and high teacher turn over consumes economic resources that could be better deployed elsewhere,” said Hancock. “The teacher shortage is real, the teacher shortage is large, the teacher shortage is growing and worse than we think. Teacher compensation is not just an issue of staffing... Now is the time for healing in our profession. Now is the time for our educators to be respected and supported. Now is the time for our educators to be restored to wholeness.”While the increase was approved unanimously, some felt that it was too soon to vote on the investment.Owens was among them. She expressed concern over the speed of the increase and felt it would be better discussed when it’s time to discuss the district’s budget.Additionally, Owens said that some board members have not fully seen every piece of the salary scale and that transparency is important.“It’s really hard to look at the numbers up there, which are significantly higher, and then consider there’s a loss. But the same way that we came back and talked about the reasons for not stretching out our salary scale to more years so that teachers could get that money earlier, we’re doing the opposite with those bumps,” said Owens. “I think we need to be really transparent about how that’s working so that people understand that yes, it is significantly better—we can’t really argue against raises, that’s hard to do—but I do think it’s something that we need to look at in the future so that we don’t forget that there is that piece that could make a really big difference if we did it equally across all the years instead of holding it back and then bumping up.”