DAVID MAMARIL HOROWITZ

david.horowitz@bgdailynews.com

Warren County Public Schools is raising salaries at least 4% for nearly all full-time employees who work through the school year, WCPS Chief Financial Officer Chris McIntyre said.

The WCPS Board of Education approved the 4% raise – one of WCPS’s two biggest in the past decade – at its Tuesday regular session.

Across-the-board employee raises generally entail a much smaller “step” increase of around 0.5% annually to help mitigate inflation – and WCPS is adding upwards of a 0.5% step increase this time, again, for a total raise of 4.5%, at minimum, in the fall 2025-26 school year, McIntyre said.

Both increases are generally for employees who work full time through the school year, with potentially a few exceptions, according to McIntyre.

Teachers are paid based on what’s called a salary table, which determines pay by factoring in greatly varying education and experience. Within that variation, some employees’ salaries previously weren’t keeping up with competitive pay for others in the same salary table section – but WCPS has worked diligently over the past decade to close those gaps, and this year has added slight additional raises for positions in those cases, McIntyre said.

As a result, there will be at least some employees who could see raises that total as much as 5.5%, rather than the base 4%.

“It truly depended on, in reviewing other district salary tables and comparing us to them, was there a year or group of years where we were out of alignment that I could tweak it a little bit – to where we’re more competitive in those years with those neighboring school districts?” he said.

Starting salaries will increase from $45,000 to $47,000 for teachers who fall within the “Rank III” section of the salary table, which includes completely new teachers, according to WCPS. Starting salaries of “rank II” teachers will go from $50,000 to $52,000, and those of “rank I” teachers will increase from $55,000 to $57,800, McIntyre said.

The raises, he said, come amid a workforce shortage “no matter what (…) position you’re looking at.”

Compared to peer groups of adjacent districts and independent school districts within those areas, the raises make WCPS “extremely competitive,” McIntyre said.

“Our goal is, how can we recruit, retain and attract the best?” he said. Whether a teacher or a tradesman on a construction project, “there’s still a need for really good, high quality people in a lot of those positions – teaching being one of those critical positions … Preparing students is our job, and we want to do the very best at it, and to do the very best at it, you have to have quality people.”

The raises were possible, he said, due to funding increases from the county’s property assessment growth and, predominantly, the Support Education Excellence in Kentucky. The latter is the state’s foundational K-12 funding program, for which the Kentucky legislature has increased funding by approximately $6 million through the 2025-26 school year for WCPS – which absorbs the cost of the salary raises, McIntyre said.

The SEEK increase follows many years where SEEK has failed to keep up with inflation, according to a recent SEEK report by the Council for Better Education, which is headed by WCPS Superintendent Rob Clayton.

Student saves a life

Warren Central High student Caleb Hammer saved a boy’s life and was recognized by the Board for it Tuesday. As a boy was drowning on April 22, Hammer dove into water and swam about 50 feet to save him, stated Clayton, who said he was reading a police report.

“It’s without a doubt that Caleb saved this juvenile’s life that day,” Clayton read from the report. “His actions bring credit to himself, his family and certainly our school community.”

His father, Michael Hammer, told the Daily News: “He’s just a gift to the world. I believe that – I’ve been saying that his whole life, and that just proves it. But that’s all people – we’re all that way. And that’s what he (saw) in that kid.”

Clayton ‘exemplary

’The Board of Education determined Clayton’s performance to be “exemplary,” the top rating, in its two evaluation standards for superintendents– strategic and instructional leadership.

The evaluation pointed to numerous accomplishments: planning of the Impact Center, WCPS’s focus on its Leader in Me leadership program, and much more.

Aligning policies

Similar to the Bowling Green Independent School District board earlier this month, the WCPS board approved numerous policies to comply with new laws from the previous state legislative session.

These include, among many other updates, requiring the board to choose a traceable communications system as the only means of electronic communication between students and the employees and volunteers of WCPS; adding a moment of silence or reflection lasting one to two minutes at the start of each day’s first class; developing a process to prevent social media from being accessed through district technology; and restricting personal telecommunications devices during instructional time (with exceptions for devices authorized through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), according to the policy documents.