BATON ROUGE - The East Baton Rouge School Board started running the numbers for the upcoming year’s budget  in the first of four meetings.

Included is a proposed pay raise for teachers, which if passed, would be the first raise since 2008. Thursday’s meeting lasted more than two hours as board members debated whether the amount proposed was enough.

The proposed budget introduced a $1,300 dollar raise for school employees in addition to an existing raise. But, when the board compared the number to the previous year’s take home pay, the increase would still result in a smaller paycheck. That’s because during the 2023-2024 school year, teachers received two stipends, according to the budget.

"If you look at pay as to what people get in their paycheck, it's not a pay raise. It's actually a pay cut,” District 7 board member Mike Gaudet said.

Support staff is not included in the raise. Last year, bus drivers and cafeteria workers received one time stipends. Board member Dadrius Lanus says support staff needs to be included in this year’s pay increase.

“Whether you are a bus driver, whether you are a mechanic, whether you are a cafeteria worker, I think all of those people deserve to have some of that compensation that is also equal to what is given to those inside of our classrooms,” Lanus said.

Interim Superintendent Adam Smith says the budget can change when the school year begins.

“We can make those adjustments, if we need more funding allocated towards literacy because the budget is made on a set of assumptions. It's not real," Smith said.

Below are the dates and locations of the next three public budget meetings:

May 30 Park Forest Middle School

June 13 Capital Middle School

June 18 South East Middle School

For the raises to go into effect, the board must vote to approve them by July 1st.