More cash for some Wake teachers? Educators at high-needs schools could be eligible for more bonuses under new program

In Wake County, teacher vacancy rates have hovered between 2% and 3%, but that can amount to a couple hundred openings at any given time.

New teachers and assistant principals will be eligible for a $1,500 signing bonus, and new principals will be eligible for a $2,500 bonus. They’ll be eligible for another bonus of the same amount if they stay for two years. Only people hired between Oct. 1, 2024, and Sept. 1, 2026, will be eligible for the recruitment bonus.

The school system will also hire additional recruiters for employees. It currently only has one recruiter for the entire 160,000-student school system. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, by comparison, has several recruiters, Mary Bohr, the Wake system's senior director for professional learning, told the school board.

The bonuses resemble a scaled-down version of existing statewide performance bonuses and some of the recruitment and retention bonuses offered during earlier stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, when employee vacancies rose. District leaders credited those bonuses with preventing at least some people from leaving.

Teacher vacancies remain higher than normal in Wake County and beyond as pay for the profession continues to lag far behind other careers that require high-priced college degrees.

“If teaching is not elevated and treated as a profession, there will be an even more dire shortage of teachers,” school system officials wrote in their application for the federal grant.

High-needs schools tend to have fewer experienced teachers and worse teacher retention rates than other schools.

The “high-need” schools set to be a part of the new program are mostly in central and eastern Wake.

The U.S. Department of Education has provided the Wake County Public School System with $4.5 million toward the effort, part of $114.8 million awarded to schools nationwide in 2023. Over three years, the district will receive $13.5 million that it will match with $15.6 million of its own.

The grants are intended to increase educator compensation and increase educator diversity. Wake’s school system — the biggest in the state — has a diverse student body. But teachers remain mostly non-Hispanic white and female in the district, and across the state.

Research shows teachers of color have positive impacts on students of color.

The project in Wake County is scaled down from the proposal the Department of Education initially improved, because the school system had asked for more money than it received.

The original proposal would have given employees at those 24 schools higher base pay, rather than bonuses, and the higher base pay would have applied to more employees. As originally proposed, teachers, instructional assistants, principals and assistant principals would have been eligible for $2,000 in extra base pay based on performance, at least $3,000 more in base pay for retention and thousands more dollars toward professional development.

The Wake County Public School System’s new program is intended to improve teacher quality in the hopes that it will increase teacher retention.

Teachers will be required to participate in more professional development than typically required as a condition of receiving the bonuses and having access to funding to cover the cost of certification, tuition and exam fees.

"We really emphasized that remaining at the school through 2026 will add additional requirements and expectations of you," said Cheryl Stidham, the district's senior director of talent management.

A school is considered “high needs” if at least 50% of their students qualify for free or reduced-price school meals, the school has a “D” or an “F” performance grade from the state, and they meet one other criteria. Those other criteria are related to school performance, the makeup of the student body or teacher turnover.

About 60 schools are considered “high needs” under the definition created by the school system, but the grant won’t cover them all. The system chose 24 schools at random instead. Those will include 18 elementary schools and six middle schools.Those schools serve about 13,500 students and employ 150 teachers, 144 instructional assistants and 48 principals and assistant principals. The schools are disproportionately Black and Hispanic.

At those schools, 27% of all teachers at those schools left by the end of the 2021-22 school year, according to a system analysis of state data. Meanwhile, students are testing proficiently on end-of-year tests only about 41% of the time.

Another 24 "high-needs" schools that weren't selected will be monitored as a control group, to see if the Project LEADERS program made a difference by comparison.

Other organizations also received federal grant money toward teacher support. Elsewhere in North Carolina, over the next three years, The Innovation Project — a Raleigh-based group that supports school leaders across North Carolina — will receive $21.5 million, Montgomery County Schools will receive $21.5 million and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools will receive $7.7 million.

The Innovation Project submitted its application with eight school systems: Asheboro, Edgecombe, Elizabeth City-Pasquotank, Lexington, Mount Airy, Scotland, Vance and Warren. Their project will focus on teacher training and support and attempt to place high-performing teachers with the “most vulnerable” students.