School support staff pay extended in full
By Daniel Arens
As teachers navigate the many difficulties of adapting themselves and their kids to the world of online education, administrators and school board members try to maneuver through the many questions facing their responsibilities of guiding the district as a whole.
One of the primary tasks facing the school board is how to continue to employ and utilize the help of the various support staff in the district at a time when distance education has removed them from their traditional roles in the schools.
“It seems like every time we come up with a possible solution, we find a hurdle we are coming up against,” Ken Miller, Hazen School District Superintendent, said.
Miller said some support staff are clearly essential, like custodians doing cleaning and kitchen staff preparing meals. They may not work the regular hours they would during a normal week in school, but their services are certainly needed.
Overall, Miller said the primary goal was to figure out the equitable piece of support staff. If some of these employees, like kitchen staff, remained working to at least some extent, and others didn’t, and yet both continued to receive the same level of pay: that wouldn’t be fair to those who were working. On the other hand, to determine somehow which positions were “essential” and which ones could be done without: that wouldn’t be fair to those employees who, through no fault of their own, cannot contribute much in their hired positions during the present situation.
