The Glynn County School Board voted 6 to 1 on Tuesday to accept a new three-year contract for District Superintendent Scott Spence.
The contract runs until 2025.
School board member Mike Hulsey was the only one to vote against approving the new contract. He raised concerns about the included salary increase.
“I don’t think we ever, if I remember correctly, threw out a whole contract and redid it,” Hulsey said after returning from the school board from a nearly hour-long executive session. “It was a contract signed by both parties. It was a three-year contract. And I don’t recall us ever breaking an existing contract.
Hulsey said he praises the district’s recent efforts to review staff salaries and offer raises that make Glynn County schools’ pay rates competitive in the region. But he disagreed with changes to the superintendent’s contract.
“A lot of (salaries) were too low, and we had to raise them,” he said. “But a 30% increase right off the bat is just a bit much in my opinion. It’s a bit unprecedented.
The salary increase in Spence’s contract, Hulsey said, will be about $48,000 a year.
Spence’s original contract called for an annual salary of $160,000 with an annual rate of increase of 3%. The News did not have access to the new contract at press time.
“I will vote against it,” Hulsey said.
School board member Eaddy Sams said the contract update makes similar adjustments to what has been done across the board for nearly all staff in the school system.
“We kind of applied what was applied to teacher and staff salary adjustments in the same way while looking at this particular contract,” she said.
In other matters, the school board voted unanimously to approve a new divisional concept policy that the state said needed to be in place by Aug. 1.
The policy is tied to state Bill 1084, the “Protecting Students First Act,” which prohibits school boards and administrators from discriminating on the basis of race and aims to protect students lessons that make them feel guilty about their race.
According to the policy, “divisive concepts” imply that one race is inherently superior to another, that the United States of America is inherently racist, and that an individual’s moral character is inherently determined by their race.
