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Some Mukilteo School District employees say they are not getting raises they were promised

By Joanna Small
By Joanna Small

Teachers across western Washington have settled on sizable increases in salary but some staff members from at least one North Sound school district said they have been forgotten.

Employees who are not teachers in the Mukilteo School District said they’re being robbed of the raises that are due them.

They attended the school board meeting Monday night to demand answers.

“I love my job a lot,” Hayley Smith said.

The Mariner High School paraeducator said she loves her job so much that she’s willing to do it for less than $21 an hour.

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“We often stay later. We come in early. We do what we need to do, unpaid, just because we need to get it done and it’s all about the kids, all about the students,” Smith said.

But, she and her colleague Jana Compau said, that doesn’t come without sacrifice.

“I have six kids so it’s really hard for me,” Smith said.

“I’ve had a couple of kids and I’ve never been able to cover their medical insurance,” Compau said.

Teachers from school districts across the state picketed, and some even went on strike, for pay raises, after the Legislature approved a budget that fully funds education in the state of Washington. The rallying proved fruitful, with significant teacher wage increases, most in double digits.

In Mukilteo, that increase was 13 percent. But “classified staff” -- meaning bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers and paraeducators-- are under a different union, and the Mukilteo School Board has offered them a 3.1 percent raise.

According to their contract, they are due a 6 percent raise.

“The school board won’t talk to us. They won’t acknowledge us. Their excuse is that there is a 3.1 percent cap, but that’s not true,” Smith said.

That is also what a district spokesperson told us, so we went to the state superintendent of public instruction and learned that Senate bill 6362, passed in 2018, adds some exceptions to the limits to annual salary increases.

The paraeducators said the additional state funds are an exception, and they simply want a fraction of what teachers in their district and others are getting.

“We’re the ones who are taking care of them. We’re the ones who hug them when they are sad, who are fixing their boo-boos. We are taking care of these kids like they’re our own and we just ask the Mukilteo School District come back and talk to us and take care of us like we’re their own,” Smith said.

Cox Media Group

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