ABINGDON, Va. (WJHL) – The Washington County Virginia School Board approved an additional 2% raise for teachers, adding to the 3% that was approved last month in August.

This will add $977 to every step on their Teacher Salary Scale.

Washington County Virginia Superintendent Keith Perrigan said this additional 2% raise will help their salaries be more competitive across the region.

Other faculty members and staff will also be getting raises as well.

“We want to send the message not only to our current employees, but to our future employees as well, is that we’re dedicated to improving teacher salaries, custodian salaries, cafeteria workers salaries, bus driver salaries,” Perrigan said. “It takes everybody to make the school system work. And so we want to pay everybody as well as we can.”

Some positions will receive a 4% raise due to administrators not receiving as much of an increase as others. Perrigan said their administration’s salaries are already competing well against other school districts.

“Our administrators won’t quite receive a 2% raise and the money that we save from doing that, we’re going to put it into some of our hourly employees,” Perrigan said. “And so our nurses, some of our maintenance folks, our technology folks, our cafeteria workers will actually receive a 4% raise.”

Substitute teachers will also receive a raise. Licensed substitute teachers will be paid $130 per day and non-licensed will be paid $110 per day.

“When our teachers are out, it’s been really hard to get substitute teachers in there,” Perrigan said. “And part of that is because of the availability of employees, but the other part of that is because of the low pay. So, actually over the last two school board meetings, we’ve increased sub pay by $15 a day over the last two school board meetings, which is pretty significant across the board.”

Perrigan said over the last two years they’ve increased pay by 13.5% for employees.
He said they still have more progress to do to pay school employees what they deserve.

“The work that our employees do each and every day in our buildings is really life-changing work,” Perrigan said. “And so we’re going to continue to strive to get those salaries up. And so this is just the beginning.”

Washington County Virginia school employees will start seeing this raise on their last paycheck in the month of September.