The Klein ISD board of trustees approved a pay raise and a new benefits plan for its employees at a July 13 meeting.[/caption]As the district works toward finalizing its budget for the 2015-16 school year, the Klein ISD board of trustees approved raises and a new benefits plan for thousands of employees.
The board approved a general pay raise of $2,160 for teachers, librarians, nurses and speech pathologists—the largest group of employees with more than 3,600 on staff. The increase is a 4 percent raise of the control point, or a point between the minimum and maximum salary available to employees, district officials said.
First-year teachers also saw a salary bump from $50,000 last year to $51,000 this year. Newly hired teachers with a masters degree will receive an additional $1,000 and those with a doctorate degree will receive an extra $2,000.
“We’re excited about raising our minimum teacher salary to $51,000,” said Curt Drouillard, associate superintendent of human resource services. “This puts us right in line with our neighboring school districts.”
KISD Superintendent Jim Cain said the district was originally considering a two or three percent pay increase. However an additional $8.4 million in revenue received from the state from the last legislative session helped the district raise the pay bump to four percent.
The extra contributions from the state also allowed KISD to consider raising the district’s debt service portion of its property tax rate this year by two cents per $100 valuation rather than the four cents estimated following the passage of a $498 million bond referendum in May, Cain said.
“We’re excited about raising our minimum teacher salary to $51,000. This puts us right in line with our neighboring school districts.”
- Curt Drouillard, associate superintendent of human resource services for Klein ISD
“Prior to the $8.4 million in additional revenue [received from the state], we talked about raising the tax rate because of the bond by four cents in the first year,” he said. “Now it would just be two cents, and that would be a tremendous savings to our taxpayers.”
The board will approve the overall budget and tax rate later this summer.
The state funding helped KISD soften the blow to employees from health care premium increases as well, district officials said. The board of trustees approved a new health care plan at the July 13 meeting in which 59 percent of its employees will not see an increase in health care costs but rather a $5 savings per month.
Drouillard said premiums increased by about $2.5 million for the district in 2015-16, but KISD agreed to cover 70.8 percent of the increase, or about $1.8 million. The district agreed to cover the same amounts—$21 for employee only, $48 for employee and children, $69 for employee and spouse and $91 for employee and family—for the premium increase across all three plans it offers to employees.
About 59 percent of all employees are insured through the TRS ActiveCare 1 HD plan, or the plan with the lowest premiums and the highest deductibles. Those employees will not see an increase in premium costs while employees of the other two plans will see premium costs rise.
The highest increase in monthly premiums will be $122 a month for employees on the richest plan who are insured with their spouses, Drouillard said.
“We just felt like because you chose a more rich plan, we wouldn’t be giving you more money,” he said. “We decided to give the same amount—the $21, $48, $69 and $91—as the contributions this year.”
