Budget season is about to begin for Hamilton County Schools, and the decisions made in the coming months around staffing and health insurance could impact students and staff for years.
Hamilton County school board members gathered for the first of several budget related meetings Monday and began discussing where funding should be allocated during the 2025-26 academic year.
To Superintendent Justin Robertson, the biggest pressure point in the budget is the increasing cost of health care.
He pointed to the board’s decision roughly five years ago to remove the waiting period for new employees’ health insurance to take effect as an example of something the district may want to look at and do differently.
In 2023, the board voted for the first time in 10 years to increase employees’ health insurance premium contribution.
“That is not sustainable,” Robertson said. “I’m not saying we need to do that every year, but we need to get in the habit of looking at it every year and making some hard decisions at least every couple years.”
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Nearby school districts pay more than Hamilton County does, Vice Chair Karitsa Jones, D-Chattanooga, said, so board members have worked during her time on the board to increase other benefits to boost employee morale.
“I do want us to strongly consider when you start talking about reducing things for human capital that I went to UTC graduation in December, and it was about 20 folks over there in the School of Education,” she said. “Unless we’re graduating 200 people every semester, we really need to be cognizant of how we think about trimming an already naked bird because we’re already in flesh and bone.”
This school year, roughly three-quarters of the district budget is dedicated to staff salaries and benefits, Chief Financial Officer Mary Ellen Heuton said.
As the district goes through the budget process, it intends to be collaborative, clear and transparent, and good stewards of taxpayer money, Robertson said. It also intends to ensure every dollar spent is directly tied to one of the district’s commitments.
Based on feedback from school board members, administration, teachers and parents, some of the community’s budget priorities include safe and secure schools, literacy support for kindergarten through second grade, elementary and middle school intervention and gap closure, and employee compensation and benefits.
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Board member Steve Slater, R-Soddy-Daisy, said he’d like for the district to look into increasing the supplements for coaches. The district supplements its coaches’ pay with a percentage of their teaching salaries.
Baseball and softball coaches maintain the fields year-round, Slater said, but receive a smaller supplement than basketball coaches who aren’t doing maintenance during the offseason. He asked to increase the supplements for baseball, softball and wrestling coaches to the same percentage as basketball coaches.
“I think that is fair because, especially the baseball and softball coaches in the summer, they work like crazy on those ball fields,” he said.
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Board member Jodi Schaffer, R-East Brainerd, agreed.
Robertson said it’s something that needs to be looked at.
“This is a card game,” he said. “And so if we say we want to put $300,000 additional into coaching stipends, OK, that’s going to mean we’re going to have to make a different decision somewhere else.”
The district expects to present its first draft of the budget at the end of March, Robertson said
The board is expected to vote on the budget at its April meeting. It will then head to the Hamilton County Commission, which is responsible for approving the budget.
Contact Shannon Coan at scoan@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6396.