Since the IT professionals are the last employee group to be considered, the group also is expected to have a cumulative review of all their recommendations in September. The committee is expected to vote on the proposal for IT workers at its Sept. RELATED: School pay committee sets raises for secretaries, custodians RELATED: Food service workers, paraprofessionals could get raises So far, they’ve adjusted pay for groups 1305 (teachers, nurses, principals, superintendents, administrative and supervisory employees), 1308 (administrative secretaries, financial secretaries, senior secretaries, secretaries and clerks), 1311 (school custodians), 1322 (school food service workers) and 1324 (paraprofessionals). The committee discusses and votes on pay changes based on employee groups, outlined in Title 14 of Delaware Code. “This is solely what the state’s cost would be to establish the current units for these IT positions,” he said, “but it is not reflective of any compensation level that these individuals should be at.” “If this number gets too high in this overall recommendation, there will have to be choices made by the governor and the legislature, so I just want to make sure that we’re keeping our recommendation realistic to the fiscal reality.”Ĭouncil member Cerron Cade, director of the Office of Management and Budget, pointed out that the proposal doesn’t necessarily touch on competitive wages. “If this group had the choice between putting $1 million into salaries for teachers or $1 million into salaries for IT professionals, my suspicion would be that they put the million dollars into teachers,” Starkey said. It recently passed legislation that would bring the starting salaries of teachers to $60,000 by July 1, 2026. That will allow Delaware to stay competitive with neighboring Maryland. One of the main reasons the committee was formed at the beginning of the last school year was to increase the starting pay for teachers to $60,000. RELATED: Heated debate ends in vote to raise teacher pay over 4 yearsĪll salary decisions must be approved by the General Assembly’s Joint Finance Committee, which creates the state’s budgets.Ĭompensation committee members also have had to weigh which employee groups the state should prioritize with salary changes in order to combat education employee shortages. Others insist the recommendations must be reasonable enough that the state can fund the decisions. Some emphasize that its job is to make recommendations so Delaware can compete regionally for educators. There has been some debate in previous meetings surrounding the duties of the committee. “It’s not at all clear to me that we can do all of this.” “$13 million to IT professionals makes it harder to get $13 million to teachers where we know that we have a problem,” said committee member Jonathan Starkey, the governor’s chief of staff. It would also include a local district share of $2,400,914 in fiscal year 2025 and $4,450,329 in Fiscal Year 2026.ĭuring the discussions, the committee did not specify the salary for an IT worker. The proposal discussed in the meeting would create funding units for information technology workers, costing the state $6,926,517 in fiscal year 2025 and $12,693,483 in fiscal year 2026. They now are paid according to seemingly random salary scales, sometimes as an educator, custodian, paraprofessional or something else.īecause the state does not provide funding units for them, districts are left to decide how to fund those positions. Also Monday, the committee introduced an updated pay scale for the 180 information technology workers in Delaware’s public schools.
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