During Monday night’s meeting, the Brownwood ISD Board of Trustees unanimously approved a 3% pay raise for returning employees for the 2023-24 school year.

Brownwood Superintendent Dr. Joe Young told the board, “Teachers who returning to the district would receive a 3% raise based on their total compensation that they received last year. It’s different from this year in that everyone had a salary and then everyone received two 1% retention incentives. We put all that together for an amount, which is how much people took home last year, and we added 3% on top of that. So it’s not just the salary piece, it’s all the money they received last year in compensation. 3% of that amount is what they will receive as returning employees.”

Young then stated a survey was extended to employees asking if they would like all money divided over 12 paychecks or continue the concept of receiving a portion of the salary over 12 paychecks and have two incentives along the way, as was done for the current school year. Continuing the current format was selected with 1% incentives coming in August and December, with the remaining 98% of the salary spread out over 12 months.

Young added that teachers who are new the school district for the 2023-24 school year will receive a beginning pay of $44,500 per year, with 0-5 years of experience. The scale increases based on additional years of teaching experience.

“That has been created so that all returning employees will receive more than someone new to the district at the same scale, which we thought was important,” Young said. “Someone coming back with six years of experience will make more than someone new to the district with six years of experience, for example.”

Young stated that the outcome of the Texas Legislative session could result in an additional bump in pay for the upcoming school year.

“This is the baseline and the minimum that we give,” Young told the Board. “If the Legislature comes back and allocates more money for teachers’ salaries, or gives us a bump and we need to put more money into teachers’ salaries, then we will go above and beyond what we’re voting on today.”

Also during Monday’s meeting, the Board unanimously approved a one-year contract with Draco’s Janitorial for custodial services for the upcoming school year.