GREENVILLE — Teachers in Greenville County will get a $1,300 raise next year in a nearly $1 billion operations budget that passed unanimously this week.
The 2025-2026 spending plan, which starts July 1, was the combination of months of work, including negotiations with state lawmakers to increase state payments to traditional public schools at the expense of online charter schools.
The district also persuaded the Greenville County government in recent weeks not to grab millions of dollars in industrial property fees from the schools’ coffers.
The Greenville budget, passed June 2, does not increase taxes.
“I am really excited about approving this budget,” said Sarah Dulin, one of the leading conservative voices on the school board.
Another board member, Angie Mosley, thanked the district’s administration for hiring 10 more special education teachers and boosting pay for special education classroom aides to a minimum of $19 an hour.
Every employee in the district will get a pay increase of at least 2.4 percent.
Amid economic uncertainty nationally, raising taxes for public schools in Greenville proved politically untenable.
One casualty of the district’s belt-tightening was a proposal to increase parental leave to 12 weeks. It will remain at six weeks.
In a brief public hearing, one person spoke in favor of the budget’s pay increase for teachers while a second person criticized the district’s approval earlier this spring of a $24 million plan to install artificial turf at all 16 of the district’s high-school football fields.
School districts with the highest teacher salaries — including Charleston and Beaufort — are pulling away from the rest of the state in terms of pay, Greenville Superintendent Burke Royster pointed out. Charleston’s base pay for new teachers is now $65,000, compared to $51,841 in Greenville. Greenville’s goal, Royster said, is to remain among the top five of South Carolina’s 72 traditional school districts for teacher pay.
“Those below us will be moving closer to us, but I think we’re still in a reasonably good position to maintain where we are while realizing that people are closing on us,” Royster said.
