Pay raises are coming soon for Wake school employees. See how much extra they’ll get.

Wake County school employees will see bigger paychecks this month as pay raises go into effect.

The Wake County school board adopted new salary schedules last week to allow state and locally funded pay raises to be paid out beginning in August paychecks. The raises include a 4% increase in the local salary supplement for teachers and a higher minimum salary of $20 an hour for bus drivers and $17.75 an hour for other support staff.

The pay raises are retroactive to July 1. The retroactive pay will be paid in the September paycheck.

“I know that we have a lot of staff, a lot of our teachers, a lot of our non-certified staff ... looking forward to receiving the benefits of some of the changes we made in our salary schedules,” school board chair Chris Heagarty said before the vote.

The raises had been on hold while Wake waited to see if state lawmakers would reach a new budget deal. Instead, the General Assembly passed a bill authorizing pay raises for school employees it had included last year in the two-year state budget.

David Neter, the district’s chief business officer, told board members that they don’t anticipate the General Assembly will take any additional action that would impact Wake’s budget.

The raises were also made possible by the Wake County Board of Commissioners providing most of the district’s requested $63.2 million increase in local funding.

Teacher pay raises

The state is providing an average raise of 3% for teachers. But the raises are significantly higher for beginning teachers than experienced educators.

Commissioners also fund a local salary supplement for teachers that will go up 4% this year.

A Wake teacher with no prior experience will get a starting salary of $48,340.

At the upper end of the scale, a Wake special-education teacher with 31 years of experience who has a master’s degree and national board certification will get $86,752.

The average salary for a Wake teacher was $58,331 in the 2022-23 school year.

A perk offered by Wake is that it pays 10% extra to teachers who have a master’s degree. This includes teachers who missed the state’s 2013 cutoff to continue receiving extra master’s degree pay.

Raises for bus drivers

The state provided bus drivers with a 3% raise this year. Wake went above that by using local dollars to raise the minimum salary for drivers to $20 an hour.

Traditional-calendar schools will open Aug. 27 with all bus riders assigned to a route with a permanent driver. But the district wants more drivers to reduce the high number of routes each driver must run daily.

Over the past several years, Wake has changed routes due to not having enough bus drivers.

“This $20 an hour we hope continues to chip away at the challenge that we face here locally, across the state and across the country in our need to recruit and retain these important staff,” Neter told the board.

The school board agreed to increase the raises for bus drivers and teachers after the Wake County chapter of the North Carolina Association of Educators held protests in April outside some schools.

Raises for lowest-paid workers

The district’s other classified staff — which includes cafeteria workers, teacher assistants and custodians — also are getting a 3% raise from the state this year.

But Wake is using local money to give classified staff either a $17.75 minimum hourly salary or a 4% salary increase. The minimum hourly wage had been $17.

In recent years, Wake’s support staff have seen some of the biggest percentage pay increases in an effort to provide them closer to a living wage.

In 2021, the district raised the salaries for hourly workers to a minimum of $15 an hour. Some workers had been paid as little as $11.80 an hour.

“It’s amazing that we’re able to get our employees up to $17.75 an hour minimum for our lowest-paid workers and our bus drivers up to $20 an hour,” school board member Lindsay Mahaffey said last week.

But Mahaffey also pointed to how it will still take 13 years for bus drivers and 22 years for the lowest-paid support staff to reach a salary of $40,000 a year.

To help employees budget their pay, Wake will begin in January paying classified staff twice a month instead of once a month. Wake will start with bus drivers and cafeteria workers.

State law prevents school districts from paying teachers more than once a month.

WCPSS 2024-25 Salary Schedules by Keung Hui on Scribd