Employees of Isle of Wight County Schools will receive a 4% pay increase in addition to their 1% to 2% annual raises under the division’s 35-step pay scale, per a 3-2 School Board vote on May 29.

That vote adopted a budget of $100.8 million for the 2025-26 school year, bolstered by an extra $1.2 million in state funding allocated in the state budget for IWCS.

Board members John Collick and Michael Cunningham joined Board Chairman Jason Maresh in voting in favor of the pay raise. Vice Chairman Mark Wooster and board member Brandi Perkins cast the two dissenting votes.

“A month ago we weren’t expecting to get an additional $1.2 million in state revenue. … For me, this is a no-brainer: We absolutely go and give it to the teachers,” Maresh said.

The state budget hadn’t been finalized when the School Board initially adopted its 2025-26 budget in March. According to IWCS spokeswoman Lynn Briggs, the increase in state funding is tied to changes the General Assembly and Gov. Glenn Youngkin made to the calculation tool used to determine funding for local school divisions and is unrelated to average daily membership, which refers to the average number of students enrolled divisionwide from the start of the school year through March 31. Isle of Wight’s ADM was at 5,325 as of that date, down about 100 students, or 1.3%, from the same date in 2024.

In March, Superintendent Theo Cramer recommended giving the state-mandated minimum 3% raise for a second consecutive year and asking the county Board of Supervisors for an increase in local funding to restore the step increases, which had been frozen at the start of the current school year.

“Our teachers for the past several years have barely gotten a cost-of-living increase. … This is a unique opportunity. The state is resetting the baseline of what they are giving to us, so this has nothing to do with county funds,” Collick said. “We already know that our teachers, our staff, is actually paid below what most of the other school divisions pay. This is not going to make them surpass that by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s going to help.”

According to the pay scale in place at the start of the current school year, a teacher with a bachelor’s degree who’s completed his or her 15th year would earn $60,688. In neighboring Suffolk, a 15-year teacher would start at $65,618. In Newport News, the same teacher would earn between $68,177 to $86,997 depending on whether he or she worked a 10-, 11- or 12-month contract.

“We need to support our teachers, but I’m still stuck on the fact that we already approved a budget,” said Wooster, who proposed alternatively using the extra state funding to lessen the cost of what employees pay as their share of health insurance premiums.

Human Resources Director Laura Sullivan said only around half of the division’s more than 800 employees enroll in the division’s health insurance plan, which as of May 30 had closed enrollment for the 2025-26 school year. Giving an additional 1% on top of the state-mandated 3% would result in “a lifelong change” for all employees, she said.

An employee’s retirement benefits under the Virginia Retirement System is determined by his or her highest consecutive 36 months of earnings, Sullivan said.

Cramer said in conversations with other superintendents he’s learned that several other local school divisions are also using their unexpected state funding influx to bolster salaries.

Perkins took issue with having to make a decision that evening.

“With only having basically 24 hours heads-up for this pay increase to 4%, I don’t feel comfortable supporting this,” Perkins said.

Despite the unexpected influx of state money, the $100.8 million budget reflects an overall 2.1% drop from the $103 million budget the School Board had adopted in March.

The School Board had sought a $6.6 million, or 20%, increase in county funding for annual operating expenses but received only a $3.1 million, or 9.3%, increase from the supervisors – a figure matching the amount Cramer had identified as mandatory expenses at a joint March 27 meeting of the supervisors and School Board.

The local contribution now totals $36.27 million, or just under 36%, of the division’s total budget, while state funding accounts for $39.8 million, or 39.4%. Federal assistance accounts for $5 million or just under 5%.