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Board Protects Admin Pay

The board met for their May Work Session last Thursday

And their regular voting meeting last night.

All board members were present for both meetings.

Compared to recent months, these were pretty boring meetings. Three issues stood out to me though: service delivery logs for educational service providers, homeschool students' ability to participate in marching band, and the conversation around teacher and admin salaries.

Service Delivery Logs

As mentioned in April, Tony Bostic would like to require educators to maintain service delivery logs for students who have IEPs. He maintains that this will help inform parents about their kids' education and will help protect the district when it is challenged to prove that it is complying with IEPs.

He added language to a policy amendment last month to enshrine this requirement, but front office personnel and Eric Welch resisted this idea, saying it would add an unnecessary burden on our educators. So it was removed for further consideration.

At the work session this month, Mr. Bostic told the board that he intended to propose an amendment at the voting meeting to add similar language back in. Claire Reeves suggested that the board look into seeing whether this could be accomplished with TN Pulse.

At the voting meeting, Mr. Bostic told the board that he had reconsidered and will not be proposing the amendment. He wants to see how the conversation around TN Pulse goes and then will reassess.

Homeschool Participation in Marching Band

Four community members from the Page High School community showed up to ask the board to consider the ability for a homeschool student to participate in marching band and/or color guard.

After public comment, Jason Golden and Dana Ausbrooks clarified that the district does not have a policy regarding this topic and state law is silent as well.

Jay Galbreath confirmed that the next step would be to bring this up at a policy meeting and proceed from there. It sounds like these community members were heard and the board will address the issue.

Teacher and Administrator Pay Charts

The rest of the meeting was filled with unanimous votes on budget issues and small policy tweaks until we got to the last agenda item. The Pay Charts define how district employees are paid. They break down each employee type (teacher / principal / vice principal / etc) and define their salary or hourly wages. Vickie Hall submitted the Pay Chart for board approval for this month.

Margie Johnson proposed an amendment that was complex, but she basically wanted to shift money away from administrators toward teachers.

Claire Reeves and Eric Welch were both concerned about the lack of time available to consider this change, which led to a conversation about delaying the approval of the Pay Charts. Ms. Hall said that would be problematic because they are currently trying to hire teachers. So the board agreed that a deferral was a bad idea.

The amendment failed, 8-3-1 with Tony Bostic, Dennis Driggers, and Margie Johnson voting in favor of the amendment and Donna Clements abstaining.

The unamended Pay Charts were approved 10-1-1 with Margie Johnson voting no and Tony Bostic abstaining.

Some Board Members Sue TN Department of Education

There was some school board news this month that happened outside of their public meetings. Tony Bostic, Margie Johnson, and Donna Clements are suing the Tennessee Department of Education for the alleged "chronic underfunding of Williamson County Schools." The Williamson Scene wrote a great article on it. You can read it by clicking here.

Call to Action

The last meeting of the school year will be next month, June 16, 2025. Come say hi!