DPS Comptroller Recommends No Steps, Offers New Classified Pay Schedule

The comptroller hired to delve into Durham Public Schools’ finances in the aftermath of the classified pay debacle is presenting recommendations to the Board of Education on Thursday.

Among them:

• Put every employee in a new salary grade based on all their previous experience plus the calculated reclassification increase or 11%, whichever is greater.
• Don’t use steps within new pay grades. Instead, Kerry Crutchfield recommended percentages as “the most equitable and least error-prone method of administering all salary actions for classified employees.” So, percentages above the minimum for new hires with relevant previous experience or percentages above current pay for a general or experience-based increase.
• After fully funding the classification increase, the district could add banded percentages based on DPS years of experience “to help compensate for years of frozen steps,” if the board obtains more funding for classified employee pay.

In his presentation, Crutchfield evaluates the 2022-23 DPS classified pay schedules, which he says “suffered from two major issues, primarily caused by the state’s $15/hr. minimum mandate, but partly caused by historical decisions by DPS.”

The issues:

• Significant classification compression.
• Significant variation in step increments.

“Both create significant challenges in any attempt to reclassify pay into appropriate market-rate schedules,” he wrote.

How compression occurred:

North Carolina legislators mandated $15 per hour minimum, and thus approved pay grades 50 through 62 all had $2,600 minimum pay. The school district increased grade minimums for lower pay grades above the state minimum and tried giving at least some differential between lower pay grade minimums.

“These actions took significant local money, since the state allotments that funded classified employees were based on the $2,600 per month minimums, and helped put employees in lower pay grades at close to market pay rates,” Crutchfield wrote.

But DPS didn’t increase the minimums for middle and upper pay grades.

“That action, or inaction, plus a number of years of no legislative pay increases for classified employees, left employees in the middle and upper grades below pay rates,” he wrote.

The compression isn’t limited to Durham. Crutchfield indicated that every district in the state felt that crunch of step increments as lower-paid employees got increases three times higher than their higher-paid counterparts, “and most districts could not afford to match those increase rates for higher-paid employees.”

Crutchfield’s conclusions, based on his study of the district’s 2022-23 pay schedules:

• Steps weren’t equitable, whether granted upon initial hiring or as an experience increment.
• Moving to an equitable pay plan wouldn’t be easy or inexpensive.

He reported that “the appropriate way to implement reclassifications is to compare the previous classification (grade) minimum to the new classification (grade) minimum and grant that percentage increase to each current employee in the classification.”

The board’s 11% across-the-board increase implemented at the last meeting about classified pay “is going to more than accomplish the necessary reclassification increase for the lower pay classifications and not completely accomplish the necessary reclassification increase for the higher pay classifications,” Crutchfield wrote.

He noted that a complete reclassification based on the new proposal would cost more than the district’s current local budget would allow and that variability of current step increments make it impossible to arrange steps within new pay grades “to equitably accommodate all the possibilities of individual employee pay amounts.”

If the board approves this plan on Thursday, Crutchfield offered to draft salary administration policies or regulations. He recommended taking official action to get the pay schedules in place on July 1.