The Van Buren County School Board wants to consider limiting short-term employee contracts, concerned about the potential costs.
Some of the contracts are for employees who have already retired. Board Member Barry Austin said he does not have a problem with the deals if the school system needs them. However, Austin said the keeping retired employees on the system’s books costs money.
“They retired and they are drawing their retirement right, and they come back and now we are paying them even more money,” Austin said. “Where, realistically, for that amount of money, we can go hire a teacher. Yeah, we can hire two people full-time for what that costs us.”
Austin said student enrollment has declined over the years, but staff has not. Director of Schools Katina Simmons said the contracts can be reworked in the future.
“That’s just, you know, they can’t go over 90 (days),” Simmons said. “I mean, we can do less than that, we can adjust.”
One contract in question was a 120-day contract for ELA Instructional Coach Jan Walter. Simmons said Walter has been a big help to the school system.
“As principal, I recognized that she was phenomenal at supporting english teachers and had asked Mrs. Cope could we use her as an instructional coach because she did have so much knowledge and was so good and we were adopting a new english curriculum, and I’ll say and Mr. Campbell could speak to this to and probably everybody in the room, she’s been amazing at helping our ELA teachers.”
