The Denton ISD school board voted to give a one-time $750 payment to every teacher in the district in their March paychecks. Nonteaching staff will get a one-time payment that equals a 1% increase of their role’s midpoint salary range.
The vote applies funds from the voter-approved tax ratification election last year, which voters passed as Proposition A. The vote doesn’t negate a pay raise in the 2026-27 school year, when administrators plan to recommend a compensation increase.
The payments seem small when weighed against the tax ratification’s bounty: an added $26 million.
But district leaders said Denton ISD’s deficit would eat a large portion of the funding.
“We had about a $16 million deficit, so we knew coming out of the VATRE we would have about $10 million,” Superintendent Susannah O’Bara said. “But ... a 3% pay increase for staff will consume it.”
Denton ISD has operated on a deficit budget for several years, paring expenses and eventually choosing to leave more than 100 full-time positions unfilled. As state public education funding has slowed, Texas public schools have struggled to cover costs. The district also increased class sizes, increased administrative workloads, and tapped fewer specialists to serve students who need intervention in math and reading.
The district’s decisions were labored, and O’Bara said more than once: You can increase efficiency only so far until you start to see effectiveness decline.
O’Bara said administrators sought feedback from teachers and staff to include them in prioritizing funds from the voter-approved tax ratification election, with 2,752 of about 4,500 employees completing a survey. Teachers were the largest employee group to participate, which reflects their status as the largest employee demographic in the district. O’Bara said almost an even number of elementary and secondary school teachers took the survey.
“I kept saying this: If I had a crystal ball, I think people are going to say what matters most is increasing staff and teacher compensation,” O’Bara said. “So, of the 2,700 survey participants, you can see the highest-ranking answer was increase staff and teacher pay. That’s what mattered most to them. The second-highest was reducing class sizes, and the third was restoring those out-of-classroom support positions.”
Survey data also showed that, for 71% of those surveyed, increased staff and teacher pay was “the single most important thing to them,” O’Bara said.
Employees answered questions about class size, and ranked reducing class sizes lower than pay raises. When polled about out-of-classroom support, survey-takers ranked lower in importance.
“It doesn’t mean they don’t want it, but if we have to rank between them, if you choose what’s most important of three really important things, this is how they ranked it,” O’Bara said.
Belt-tightening has become a recruitment and retention challenge for the district. In its preparation to put Proposition A on the ballot last year, Denton ISD looked at compensation for starting teachers at 14 North Texas districts comparable to Denton. Teachers in Denton ISD are among the lowest-paid.
“Every time I put that slide up in the Prop A presentations, it was just a gut punch, right? It’s devastating, because those are the teachers influencing what’s happening with our students and their outcomes every single day,” O’Bara said.
The board unanimously approved the measure. School board member Sheryl English put it bluntly:
“I have one comment. Pay the people,” she said.
Board member Charles Stafford said the recommendation was a difficult decision, but the right one.
“It’s people first,” he said. “And appreciating them had to be part of it.”
LUCINDA BREEDING-GONZALES can be reached at 940-566-6877 and cbreeding@dentonrc.com.
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