Members of the Bryan County Board of Education talked about pay for the system’s 378 non-teaching personnel for about an hour at the board’s Thursday night meeting in Black Creek.

In the end, they agreed most workers deserve better, but they questioned how much the system can afford without hiking taxes.

The BoE also spent considerable time looking at coaching supplements — just days before Richmond Hill High School head football coach Lyman Guy left for apparently greener pastures at Toombs County.

“It’s all about finding the money to do it,” BoE Chairman Eddie Warren said of pay raises.

“We have to be careful. We don’t want to get in the situation other districts were in where they gave out raises with one hand and then later had to furlough employees. But at the same time we want to be fair to our employees.”

Any raises will likely come in increments over a number of years, though Superintendent Dr. Paul Brooksher said the system is gathering data on salaries for classified personnel and supplements for coaches in order to prepare for the 2015 budget, which gets under way July 1.

“This is a monumental task,” Brooksher told the BoE before members waded through salary data on each of its classified positions, from custodians and para-pros to nurses, drivers, mechanics, bus monitors for special education buses and cafeteria workers, all in order to give administrators some idea of what they can handle as the system tries to attract and keep quality employees.

Read more in the Jan. 29 edition of the news.