Berkeley County School District employees will get a 3% pay increase
MONCKS CORNER, S.C. (WCBD) – The Berkeley County Board of Education unanimously passed a 3% pay increase for all district employees during their meeting on Monday night.
The raise will go into effect on April 15th, before hitting pay checks one month later. Chief Human Resources Officer Aimee Fulmer explained a team led Superintendent Dr. Anthony Dixon was behind the idea for the raise.
“We’re a new team under Dr. Dixon and so he really wanted to ensure that we were competitive across all school districts in our area and so he put a team together to look to ensure that we are moving in the right direction with our salary, with our titles align with people’s pay, and that we are really working towards a retention and a recruitment program in Berkeley County School District,” Fulmer said.
The starting salary for a first-year teacher in Berkely County will go from $45,397 to $46,759. This puts the district one step closer to the state’s goal of a $50,000 starting salary for teachers by 2026.
The board also voted in favor of using $1.5 million from the FY 2023-2024 fund balance to complete the first phase of an employee salary study.
“We also did a salary study looking at each one of our salary scales and the goal was to ensure that we had all of our salary scales at $15 an hour for the lowest paid employee and so we feel confident that we are going to be there with this 3% increase for all salary scales in our district,” Fulmer told News 2.
The 3% pay increase will amount to about $1.9 million in fund balance. With these new changes, the fund balance designation for this year was amended to $6.9 million which still less than the $11.9 million previously approved by the board.
“They received the money from the state and so they were able to increase the amount that they were to offer teachers and staff members in the county at this point in the school year,” Fulmer said.
The move comes after recent pay incentives rolled out by the district, on top of a 6.5% pay increase for teachers and staff which was approved in June. District officials said they’re anticipating another pay increase in July.
