Pulaski County Special School District board selects $1,000 as staff bonus

County district’s cost to pay 1,807 full-timers over $2M

Teachers and all other full-time employees in the Pulaski County Special School District will receive one-time bonus checks of $1,000 each by Dec. 15, as the result of School Board action Wednesday.

The district’s board voted 4-2 for the one-time payment to the 1,807 full-time staff members. Part-time employees — of which there are 25 state-licensed teachers and 183 support-staff members — will receive $500 bonuses.

Board members took the action at a special meeting in which they also heard a pitch from representatives of Ray and Associates, a superintendent-search firm based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to assist the board with a search for a permanent chief for the 12,000-student district.

“On behalf of all employees, I’m appreciative of the board for doing this,” interim Superintendent Janice Warren said after the meeting, during which she had recommended approval of a bonus.

She also praised the board for making the money available before Christmas rather than waiting until the end of the school year.

The total cost of the payments is projected to be $2,350,530, an amount Warren said is affordable for the district, which is simultaneously coping with the costs of building a new Mills High and Robinson Middle schools, and greatly expanding Sylvan Hills High.

The district had been working with a $80 million budget for the Mills and Robinson projects but concluded earlier this year that the amount did not comport with the district’s commitment in a long-running federal school desegregation lawsuit to spend about $55 million on Mills, a project that also includes relocation of Fuller Middle School to the current Mills campus.

The district’s budget for the Mills and Robinson campuses is now just over $100 million, $55 million at Mills and $46 million at Robinson, putting district leaders in a position of making up as much as $20 million. Some of that $20 million is likely to be pulled from the same pool of reserves that will be the source for the bonus payments.

The bonus is the first distributed to employees since December 2014, which followed a December 2013 bonus. The district has not approved an across-the-board raise to the employees’ salary schedules in recent years. Increases to the salary schedules become a permanent part of the schedules and are a recurring expense.

However, in addition the periodic bonuses, eligible employees in the Pulaski County district have received an annual step increase for their additional years of experience. Veteran employees who have reached the top step of their pay schedules are ineligible for the step increases.

The School Board at Wednesday’s meeting and at a meeting earlier this month considered various bonus payments, ranging from $500 to $2,500 per employee. Board member Eli Keller on Wednesday proposed $1,250 per employee at a cost of about $2.9 million but couldn’t get most of the board to support that.

The $1,000 bonus plan needed and received approval from the district’s personnel policies committees for the certified staff and for the support staff.

Emry Chesterfield, chairman of the committee for the support staff, and Pam Fitzgiven, chairman of the certified staff committee, thanked the board for the funding.

The School Board on Wednesday delayed until Dec. 12 a decision on how to proceed with conducting a search for a permanent superintendent to replace Warren, who became the interim leader after the board in July fired Jerry Guess in a dispute over who would make up the district’s legal team.

The presentation by Ray and Associates followed a similar presentation by a different company, McPherson and Jacobson of Omaha, Neb., earlier this month.

Ray and Associates recently assisted in the superintendent search for the Fort Smith and Rogers school districts.

It also did a search for the Bentonville School District in 2016, but the board in that district ended up selecting its interim superintendent for the job.

If the district selects the Ray and Associates firm at a base cost of $16,500, the company representatives that would assist in the search would include National Executive Director William Newman of Mountain Home, Regional Search Director Carl Davis of Powder Springs, Ga., and Regional Search Associate Roy Brooks of Little Rock, who is a former Little Rock School District superintendent and former head of the eStem Public Charter Schools Inc.

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