Hays CISD Employees Will Receive Higher Pay

by Amber Craddieth
KTSW News

*Story aired: February 2015

The Board of Trustees is setting a $1.4 million budget to compensate employees pay and necessities for Hays CISD 2015-16 school year.

Every year the Board of Trustees is required by the state to come up with a new budget for each renewing school year and The Texas Association of School Boards has recommended that the budget be $1.4 million.

The new budget will be used to ensure that employees get the pay they want and renovate school facilities, but since the district is on a budget they focus on the most important thing and that is to ensure that employees are happy with their pay.

President of the Board of Trustees Robert Limon says last year their pay groups were number fifteen out of fifteen regarding how well they paid their employees and they want to change that for the upcoming school year in order to compete with other school districts.

Limon says it is important for the district to compete as far as pay goes because they want to attract the best teachers for Hays school district.

Our job is to educate the youth in our community and what makes the biggest impact on whether we are successful or not is to have the best and the brightest teachers and staff as our employees,” said Limon. “Now obviously geographically we are in a great place because we attract a lot of new teachers from Texas State and a lot of teachers from UT, so if other districts are paying better than we are then we are not going to be able to attract the best, so it’s important to attract the really good teachers and then not just attract them but keep them with our district.”

80% of next year’s budget will be going toward the payment of employees.

Last year there was a 3.9 % increase in pay for teachers, nurses and librarians.

According to Limon all other staff received a 1.5 % increase when the Board of Trustees commissioned a compensation study to  the TASB.

The Board of Trustees were unable to achieve what they wanted for all of their employees.

The main cause in the pay deficiencies is due to the recession that happened in 2007-2009 and the conflict in priorities, but Limon say since then Hays CISD are trying to get back on the right track.

“There’s a lot of factors that got us to where we are and what we’re doing with these compensation studies is we’re really just kind of taking the machine apart and looking real closely at every position because we want to be competitive with all other area districts because we believe our community deserves to have the best employees,” said Limon.

The amount of funding a district receives is due to the enrollment for the next school year, which is now estimating to about 800 to 1000 students every year and the Board has to accommodate twenty-two schools within the district.

The Boards plans for Hays, is to supply fifteen new buses, which has already been approved  and to get projectors for every classroom and supply teachers with new Ipads in order to make preparing for presentations easier.

There will be a meeting every month until August to deliberate and prioritize the needs of the schools furthermore. Limon says this is an ongoing process and what is not taken care of the upcoming year will be a priority for the next.