This past Wednesday, Superintendent Jim McIntyre presented a proposal for the 2015-16 budget for the fiscal year, leaving many with additional questions.

In the proposal, the superintendent suggested increasing the school’s overall budget from $424.9 million to $440.7 million – a 3.7 percent increase. The main focus of the increased education budget? Increasing teachers’ pay by 4%.

Currently, the average pay for a Knoxville teacher is $45,998 and while teachers earn their bonuses throughout the school year, they don’t receive the full amount until fall – explaining why the bonuses are incorporated into the following year’s budget. In total, it would cost about $10 million to make the proposed increase happen, with the state contributing about $4.3 million.

Throughout the budget meeting, board members went back and forth on why giving teachers raises and bonuses would benefit the overall community.

According to board member Amber Rountree, “I support a raise for our teachers, but what I’ve heard continually…is I think teachers would rather see across the board versus merit pay.”

School board member Karen Carson also showed her support for increasing teacher pay, by stating that, “we can decide to do this bonus one more year with the understanding that it ends this year, so about half the teachers will get a one-time bonus or we can apply the 4 percent raise across the board that we’re trying to do.”

However, the proposed budget increase for education comes at the cost of getting rid of APEX, the district’s strategic compensation program. This caused a couple of board members to raise questions of concern – largely because many of the teachers had been working with the understanding that bonus dollars would be available throughout the course of their work.