Muhlenberg County Schools is preparing to cut all of its non-tenured teachers and slice pay about 8 percent.
The school board-approved pay cuts for all employees totaled 9.8 percent but the Kentucky Department of Education required them to then give a two percent raise.
Superintendent Randy McCarty says the cuts are due to a loss of in-lieu-of-tax money from TVA partnered with overstaffing and a glut of construction projects in recent years.
“Before I got here they had really overstaffed. Our payroll had gone up approximately $9 million since 2005,” McCarty said. “In the mean time we went on a construction binge. We had spent about $16 to $17 million of our last reserve funds….We actually built sports complexes and technical schools.”
McCarty has served as superintendent since November 2013.
He says surrounding counties are holding job fairs for the approximately 50 teachers losing their jobs, some of whom he said were married couples who both worked in Muhlenberg classrooms.
“You’ve got 50 young teachers who are doing an excellent job. They’re losing their job,” McCarty said. “We have placed 13 or 14 of them now. It’s really going to be tough. It’s not gonna jump our student ratios up a lot because we were really overstaffed to begin with.”
The school board has also proposed a 3 percent utility tax that would reduce the pay cuts by half. The cuts are not final yet, and the utility goes to a vote Jan. 22.
