Yesterday evening, at 5:45 p.m., I drove past the Durham Public Schools (DPS) Staff Development Center, as I do every day on my way home from school. However, this time traffic was standing still.
A line of 30 or so cars waited to turn into the parking lot of the small building. Throngs of people, children and adults alike, were walking down the sidewalk to the entrance. I knew it had to be about whatever it was that was going on within the “classified worker pay issue” I’d been hearing about for the past week, but I didn’t have time to stop and attend.
Later that same evening I had an unrelated meeting with an adult who’d been helping me with a project I’d been working on for college. I noticed the DPS logo and remembered that she’d recently been employed within DPS. I asked if I could interview her for our school paper. She said yes, as long as I could keep her identity anonymous.
She first showed me the operational chart on the DPS website that breaks down the setup of positions and levels of the district’s pay-grade. The chart provides that this “accounting error” (or so it’s being called by DPS) affects 1,300 people: DPS Operational Services.
These are not teachers, rather the janitors, cafeteria workers and mechanics that keep Durham schools open and running. Contrary to popular belief, bus drivers are not included in this pool. However, most bus drivers have stated they do not feel comfortable driving without a bus mechanic on duty. I’ll get back to why this matters later.
Some neighboring districts were paying nearly 30% more than DPS for the same jobs. Durham was losing employees to private sectors and other cities, so they decided to conduct a study to accurately raise employee salaries.
This research was done by an independent consulting firm. They were paid $500,000 to carry it out. Upon conclusion of this study, the Board of Education passed a budget that would increase salary for those 1,300 people. They then had to wait for state permission, which they did not receive until September.
This is where things get blurry.
These classified employees received at least a 4% raise, some more, depending on position and years of experience (this benefit is called Years of Service). DPS employees began getting paid their new salary in October 2023. In November 2023 they even received money for the months they had worked while waiting for the state to pass the budget (June 2023-September 2023).
This continued without disturbance until January 12, 2024, when classified employees received a notice that some of them would be affected by an upcoming announcement.
She then explained that Operational Services workers were gathered at the Development Center and told an “accounting error” was made and their pay raises would be rescinded.
“They made it sound like they made an error in the system just doing payroll,” she said. “[But] they adopted this suggestion and implemented it, and there was not enough money to cover the raises.”
To make matters worse, the district will also be taking away the Years of Service benefit.
“So now [we’ve] had six months of us going from [our 4% or more increased] pay rate, to a new pay rate,” she said. “And [we] might have to pay back the overage.” For her, this was over a thousand dollars.
They were only given two weeks notice of this change. District leaders had no answers for the employees after dropping this announcement.
A few days later, the superintendent announced that he would be holding a Q&A session for employees to attend.
“It very quickly turned into a town hall-style meeting, [where people shared that] they’d bought a new house, a new car, quit their third job with the raise they’d been given,” she said.
People had made down payments, and were suddenly left without the security of knowing they’d be able to pay the rest off.
“When they didn’t have answers, [employees] got mad,” she said.
This resulted in a “sick-out” where cafeteria servers, bus mechanics and front-office workers called out sick on the same day. Many bus drivers did not feel comfortable driving without a mechanic present incase of issues, so they called out sick too.
This left the burden of transportation to parents. Schools left without cafeteria workers had to scramble to find a way to feed their students. At Riverside, our Athletic Director passed out donated slices of pizza from a local business.
DPS then made a few more efforts to calm employees. Between January 12 and yesterday they released multiple different messages, in one assuring they would not have to pay back money from overage. However, people who were able to make lifestyle changes due to their raise were still left out to dry.
I wanted to know how something like this could possibly be able to slip through the cracks of such a large organization, but also knew that she could only share so much.
“Perhaps the payscale should have been addressed over the last ten years,” she said. “If there were issues with how things were decided, things that were not addressed in the past.”
She explained that there had been numerous things the district had pushed aside, leaving schools in disrepair and employees feeling unheard and unseen for years.
“Everybody is frustrated,” she said. “If there is not enough money to even fix schools, how is the decision made to spend the money [on other things]?”
Her answer made me think about Riverside. The boys bathrooms have few working sinks, the gym hasn’t had heat in months, and trailers are prone to leaking during storms. Our orchestra department has had to fix two cellos this year, which drained them of their funds, and the auditorium is desperately in need of a renovation.
It’s normal for Board of Education meetings to all include a “closed session” portion. This is where personal and confidential matters like salary are dealt with. Closed sessions are not open to everyone, but the rest is available on live stream and public record.
Most meetings span from 3-5 hours total time. The meeting across town last night remained on closed session for nearly 2.5 hours, and wrapped up right before the 8-hour mark.
I gathered that there was a deeply-rooted issue within the district that was not being shared with the public. I was intrigued by the information my source shared, and realized that there was way more to the story than was being shown in the media.
So at 8:15 p.m. I drove from South Durham, where my meeting took place, back to the Staff Development Center on Hillandale Road. I had the meeting live-streaming on my phone while I drove.
I parked in what was visibly the last remaining spot and made my way over to the building.
I’d never been there before, but the crowd of people outside made finding the meeting pretty easy. The windows were cracked open, and people were huddling under the awning to hear what was going on inside. Once inside, I had to maneuver my way around a crowd at the door to even see the scope of the meeting taking place inside.
It was standing room only. The DPS Superintendent, Pascal Mubenga, sat surrounded by board members in front of a large crowd. I did not hear him speak while I was there. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was a murder trial by the looks on the faces of the crowd.
The board made a feeble attempt to mask the anger in the room as enthusiasm for education. But employees wanted to be told the truth. They wanted their questions answered instead of dodged.
“You know what this means,” board member Alexandra Valladares said. “This means we care about education. The fact that all of you are here, we won!”
This line delivered flatly, but she continued. “I thought tonight might be like the French Revolution, but you know what the French Revolution did? It brought complete change.,”
Presumably this comment was made to unite the board and the crowd, but it did the opposite.
I had been there for 15 minutes and had learned very little about the board’s plan. The conversation seemed to be moving in circles, with comments from the crowd about the distrust and actions of the board even after the issue had been acknowledged. Many people shouted to “boot Mubenga.”
By 9 p.m. the board shared its verdict: DPS employees affected by the pay raise would not be required to pay anything back to the district. They would receive the pay rate they had been promised for the month of January, and anything that had been reduced this month would receive a second check to cover their full pay by the thirty-first (some people had already seen salary cuts before the end of January).
The Board added that DPS employees will be paid the same salary monthly in 2024 that they had received in June 2023, including the base 4% increase. The 4% was given by the state, and districts are required to enforce it. Those whose salary had increased by more than 4% (some had increased up to 27%) were reduced back to the 4% raise.
Promising that they would be paid what they had been told they would be paid only for the month of January did not raise spirits or answer the underlying question: where do we go from here?
“That’s January. What about the rest of the year?” someone shouted from the back.
“What about tax?” another person said. “Y’all are going to tax it all away!”
At this point, the energy in the room shifted. People began filing out and heading to their cars.
At the entrance I caught Larry Coppock, a bus mechanic.
“I go out and check buses that broke,” he said. “I go on service calls and I inspect buses every month.”
Coppock was not surprised by the ruling from that evening.
“I figured it would come out ‘bout like it is,” he said. “We’d get somethin’, but not what we wanted.”
He hadn’t used his raise to buy anything, but rather pay off bills he already had.
“I’m still driving a truck that’s got 282,000 miles on it,” he said. “I can’t afford to buy a [newer] truck because they took our money. They took ‘bout 640 bucks from me. [For] a lot of people, they took a lot more.”
I thanked him for his time and walked to my car, where I ran into three Githens Middle School cafeteria workers. They were still holding signs.
“No doubt that we love [the students] as our kids, we want to go to work. But we want to be paid what we deserve,” said Laroy Morton. He’s been working for DPS for three years, and loves his job.
He noticed a significant change in his paycheck in October.
“Everybody was so excited!” he said.
When he was notified of the cut, it made him feel unappreciated and unvalued for what he does.
“I worked my ass off since I was fifteen years old,” Morton said. “I need to be paid for my experience.”
He told me that, for many students, school breakfast and lunch are the only meals they may have in a day.
“We have a relationship with our students,” he said. “The kids see us first thing in the morning when we serve them breakfast. Without the cafeteria workers, the janitors, the bus drivers, you ain’t got no school.”
Morton doesn’t believe it is just an accounting error.
“I feel like it’s embezzlement,” he said. “Put that in [your story]!”
Morton and Coppock represent the behind-the-scenes workers who do so much for education, but unfortunately are some of the least appreciated. And they are only two of the 1,300 employees impacted by the Board’s decision.
Morton loves what he does, but he knows he is worth more.
“We don’t work in the corporate world,” he said. “Up there with the superintendent, they think that we’re dumb. We’re not dumb. We understand.”
My source helped me understand that this issue has been years in the making, a buildup of problems that had been ignored, and the meeting offered few solutions.
The cafeteria workers I spoke to plan to protest until they are paid what they deserve. Coppock and his fellow bus mechanics are calling out sick next week, too. From where I was standing, I could hear multiple frustrated conversations.
As I pulled out of the parking lot I heard someone say, “Larry, those buses better not move a damn inch on Monday.”
Editor’s Note: This is a developing story. The minutes from the Board of Education meeting from yesterday are available on the DPS website. Information on how salary is calculated by DPS is public record. I’ve included the emails of members of the Board below. On behalf of the sources and voices used in this story, I encourage you to share your thoughts with them.
Chair: bettina_umstead@dpsnc.net
Superintendent: Pascal_Mubenga@dpsnc.net
Writing is absolutely amazing. Thank you for covering this important issue!