The board of trustees for the Northside Independent School District has approved raises for the upcoming school year that gets San Antonio’s largest school district closer to a $15 an hour minimum wage.

The compensation package approved Tuesday gives a 4% raise to hourly staff and a 2% raise to salaried employees who won’t benefit from the Teacher Retention Allotment in the new school funding law.

As laid out in the law, the compensation package gives larger raises to classroom teachers with at least three years of experience: $2,500 raises to teachers with three or four years of experience and $5,000 raises to teachers with at least five years of experience.

The decision to give hourly employees a higher percent increase than salaried staff is a compromise between the reality of budget constraints and a push from the board’s new trustees to ensure all staff are paid at least $15 an hour.

TPR’s investigation into special educator injuries learned that low pay may contribute to staffing shortages, which places staff at greater risk of being injured.

Fred Jimenez was paid less than $17 an hour as a special education instructional assistant when a push from a student resulted in his death in February 2024. He had worked for Northside for a decade.

Northside AFT, the union that represents the district’s teachers and support staff, has called for a living wage for hourly workers for several years, but until this year its calls didn’t get much traction with the board.

May’s election put two more union-backed trustees on the board, and the conversation around compensation this year centered on increasing pay for hourly workers. When Sonia Jasso and Laura Zapata were elected in May, they pledged to ensure support staff were paid a living wage.

In June, district officials initially recommended an across-the-board 1.28% raise for all staff other than experienced classroom teachers.

“That’s what was prescribed in House Bill Two. I don’t like it any more than anyone, but that’s what, basically, we can afford, unless we go in and start making some really dramatic moves,” Northside Superintendent John Craft said during the June 24 board meeting.

The 1.28% rate comes from Northside’s calculation of how much money the district will get from the Support Staff Retention Allotment in House Bill 2, the new school funding law.

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All told, Northside expects to get about $41.7 million in new money from the law, but it will take $30.4 million just to pay for the raises for experienced teachers. That gives the district just $7.6 million to offset the deficit and pay for raises for other employees.

Megan Bradley, the district’s deputy superintendent for business and finance, also presented the board with the estimated cost to pay all staff at least $15 an hour.

She said it would only cost $1.65 million to increase the salary of everyone below $15 an hour without increasing the pay for any other workers.

“That is not ideal, and I would never recommend that,” Bradley said. “All of a sudden, everyone below that range is right there at the same level.”

In order to put $15 an hour as the minimum and adjust all hourly pay schedules to keep differences between supervisors and their direct reports, and to continue paying experienced workers more than new hires, Bradley said it would cost Northside more than $24 million.

“We’re open to take any recommendations, but I’m very concerned about the cost of this if you added $24 million to our already $70 million deficit,” Bradley said. “You’re getting into the danger zone of cash flow very quickly.”

When it became clear trustees wanted more options, they asked district officials to come back on July 15 with proposals that would give different raises to hourly workers and salaried professionals.

The compromise they landed on was a 4% raise for hourly workers, at a cost of about $6.2 million, and a 2% raise for the remaining salaried employees, at a cost of $4.5 million.

Bradley said the 4% raise will leave 724 employees below $15 an hour. All told, Northside has about 5,600 hourly employees.

But because some pay grades are 25-30% below $15 an hour, Bradley said, it would take eight years of 4% raises to bring everyone above the threshold.

“We still have people making $11.81 minimum wage, $12.75 minimum wage. It’s a little disturbing,” Trustee Laura Zapata said. “And so, when you tell me that it’s going take us eight years — to the board: I think we need to do better.”

Sonia Jasso asked the board to come up with a plan so that it doesn’t take eight years. “If we do this in a second year, we will still have like about 322 employees still not making [$15 an hour],” Jasso said. “And I feel like 300 to 200 people is a manageable amount to really come up with a strategy that we don’t have to wait eight years.”

She added: “We want to make sure that Northside is a place for students and parents to come, but it’s also a place for employees to be recognized and to be paid a livable wage. I really feel like we owe it to the Northside family to really look at strategically … so we’re not just doing the 4%, knowing that 4% for many of these individuals, we’re talking about 25 cents additional to their paycheck.”

Craft said there may be plans to reclassify some employees so they can get higher pay more quickly, but it will have to be carefully done.

Trustee Carol Harle said asking voters to approve a tax rate increase would also help Northside raise the minimum wage more quickly.

Craft said Northside is considering going out for a tax rate election in the fall of 2026.

San Antonio ISD raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour in 2019. In April, SAISD set its new minimum wage at $17 an hour.