After Tuesday\u2019s Wake County Board of Education meeting, the district\u2019s teacher assistants will work fewer hours and receive less pay.<\/p>\n
The motion approved by the board shifts teacher assistants from 10-month to 9.25-month contracts and would result in about a 7.5 percent salary reduction.<\/p>\n
The move, caused by state budget cuts, follows a similar reduction in assistant principal contracts and the laying off of 46 central services positions and one clerical position in each school.<\/p>\n
Pay rate will remain the same for teacher assistants. The district will save $2.4 million with the reductions in hours.<\/p>\n
Both the district\u2019s chief financial officer and Superintendent Tony Tata emphasized that teacher assistants would remain in classrooms whenever students were.<\/p>\n
The reduction in hours will remain in force for one year, at which time they will revisit the issue with the hope of reinstating the 10-month contracts.<\/p>\n
No board members or residents seemed happy with the decision forced upon them.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis one makes me shake my head because I\u2019m so uncomfortable doing this to our teaching assistants, who are underpaid and undervalued but such phenomenal assets to the county,\u201d said Board Member Debra Goldman.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t fulfill our responsibility when we did not ask for the same funding per student that we had in the past,\u201d said Anne McLaurin, the only board member to vote against the motion.<\/p>\n
McLaurin introduced a motion in a prior board meeting to ask Wake County to increase its schools appropriation to maintain per-pupil spending at last year\u2019s level.<\/p>\n
During the public comment period, a community member also questioned the change.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the lowest paid professional group in the district takes a pay cut, should not the administration, the highest paid groupalso take a pay cut?\u201d asked Vicki Adamson. \u201cShould not you as a board also take a cut in your stipend?\u201d<\/p>\n
bleclaire@raleighpublicrecord.org<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Teacher assistant contracts have been cut to 9.25 months in an effort to save $2.4 million. Board members approved the change Tuesday and agreed to revisit the issue in one year. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24030,"featured_media":6923,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15,23,55],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7902"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24030"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}