The school board has filled five new positions that will be responsible for evaluating teachers in the county.

State legislation once required evaluation for only tenured teachers and now requires that all be evaluated for effectiveness.

“Given legislative changes, we’re now required to observe more teachers,” Director of Schools Harry Gill said.

The evaluators are retired individuals who have experience in the school system. The jobs are part-time with no benefits. Several members of the Budget and Finance Committee were concerned with whether five people could do the job, considering an average high school has about 150 teachers.

The board seeks to provide iPads for the evaluators in order to work more efficiently.

Teachers are also likely to get a raise in the upcoming year.

Gov. Bill Haslam has requested that all certified employees get a 1.6 percent raise. That raise is likely to be extended to classified positions or non-teachers as well, Gill told the committee.

The upcoming school budget reflects a $9.8 million increase from last year. Nearly $3 million is for teacher raises and the rest is made up of school growth and upgrades.

“We’ve built our budget based on 2.5 percent growth, which is about what we’ve experienced the last two or three years,” Gill said.

Technology upgrades are needed system wide, which will cost about $500,000.

“A lot of our equipment is getting older and won’t run the software that we have,” Gill told the committee.

Grants that provided salaries to certain special education and vocational teachers are no longer available, but will be locally funded as the board has decided to retain those positions.

An increase in popularity of vocational programs at the high school level has led to a desire to keep teachers on staff for those classes, Gill explained to the committee.

“It has become a popular program. You’ve got programs like culinary arts, criminal justice, and virtual enterprise. It’s not like the old days when it was solely wood working and machine shop,” Gill said.

Gill also explained that the graduation rate of students that enter vocational programs is almost 100 percent.

“On the flip side, it’s limited to about 20 per class so it does require more teachers,” Gill said.

Discussion with the Budget and Finance Committee did not come to a close without updates on funding for Stewart’s Creek High School, which is expected to open in two years. The school board has been applying funds for the new high school and is on track.