When Molly Shaw went back to school to get her teaching degree at Western Carolina University, she thought her days as a waitress would soon be over.

But as a single mom and first grade teacher in Swain County, Shaw not only still waits tables for extra money, she also has a small business making jams and preserves to help make ends meet. The jam business is labor intensive. She picks many of her own berries, then washes them, slices them, cooks them, cans them and labels them. It’s a job she often does in the wee hours of the morning. On the weekend, she waits tables at Freymont Inn.

“It is really tough, very tough,” Shaw said of her schedule.

Living in Swain County, Shaw is one of the lowest paid teachers in the state. Swain County is one of the last remaining school districts that doesn’t pay a teacher supplement. Most counties kick in a supplement to bolster the base teacher salary provided by the state.

The lack of a supplement in Swain County makes it hard to recruit new teachers and hang on to the ones they have.

“I do believe they lose teachers,” Shaw said. “They don’t have the means to negotiate. They don’t have the money.”

She knows of a couple of teachers this year who left for higher paying counties. When a friend of Shaw’s accompanied school officials to a job fair at Western Carolina University to court graduates, it was like they were playing with one hand tied behind their back.

“All the other schools and counties hiring were giving a supplement while we were just passing out cookies,” Shaw said.

Billy Richards, a real estate attorney in Bryson City and father of two seven-year-old girls, feels better paid teachers would increase the quality of Swain County schools. Richards moved to Swain County in 1982 from Atlanta to work at Nantahala Outdoor Center and ended up sticking around to raise his family here. But it’s a decision Richard is torn over.

“Should we follow our buddies who abandon Swain County for a community with a better school system?” Richards asked. He has seen several families move to Asheville, citing better schools.

“If Swain had the reputation of having a school system of the caliber of Asheville’s they wouldn’t have moved away,” Richards said.

Richards said Swain County has a cadre of excellent and capable teachers.

“Clearly, you have great teachers who teach for love,” Richards said. “But the whole free market economy system is based on the premise that higher pay attracts the best person. The ability to attract people from the outside to come and teach is obviously difficult when you are offering them far less.”

Why no supplement?

To fund a supplement, either the county commissioners would have to appropriate more money to the school system or the school system would have to carve it out of the money it already gets from the county.

The school system doesn’t have a lot to work with, however. Swain County puts fewer tax dollars toward education as a percentage of its overall budget that many of its neighboring counties. (See chart on next page)

The Swain County School Board has never formally asked the county commissioners to provide money for a teacher supplement.

“It’s something we would like to have, of course,” said Bob Marr, the new superintendent of the school system. “It would be a great recruiting tool to hire teachers, but at the same time we have to realize our county is a small county as far the tax base. Our county is very small and we don’t have a whole lot of money.”

Marr said the county commissioners know the school board would like to have money for a supplement, despite the lack of a formal request for it during budget time.

“I think the commissioners are already aware that there is the need for a supplement,” Marr said. “They have been made aware of that. That is one of their priorities. Our county commissioners do all they can do to support education in this county.”

Marr’s stance is in stark contrast to the lobbying approach used by the school system in Haywood County. There, the school system encouraged teachers to pack the public hearings before the county commissioners during budget time and demand more funding, with the school system even taking an adversarial tact until they got what they wanted. Haywood now dedicates the largest percentage of its overall budget toward education of nearly any county in WNC.

Marr said the lack of a supplement in Swain County does hurt recruiting, but the school system plays up other assets: the great community, good quality of life, low class size.

“I always play that hand,” Marr said of job fairs. “I say ‘Look, you are coming to a community that has a great quality of life. You are coming to a community where class size is low. You are coming to a community where the people in this county certainly support education.’”

The average class size in Swain County is 20 students, a good bit lower than the state average. The school system will also pay for teachers to get their Masters degree at WCU.

This year, Swain school officials announced they would try to find the money to provide $400 Christmas bonuses, a first for the school system. The budget was prepared by the former superintendent and finance officer who recently retired. The budget includes a line item for the bonuses, but there was no code beside it saying what pot of money the bonuses were supposed to come out of. Now Marr, who recently took over as superintendent, doesn’t know where the money for the bonuses will come from.

Marr called County Manager Kevin King last week to see if the county was possibly funding the bonuses, but King told him the county knew nothing about it. Marr said the school system will have to cut other areas of the budget to find the $400 for bonuses.

When school officials announced the plan to fund a $400 Christmas bonus for teachers at a school board meeting in the spring, teachers in the audience broke into applause — which some found dismaying in and of itself.

“I thought ‘you can’t be thrilled with crumbs — you got to demand a dinner,’” Richards said.

Support for teacher salaries

It seems the public in Swain County supports higher teacher salaries. Last month, the Smoky Mountain News set up a booth in front of the Bryson City post office giving Swain County residents a chance to vote on how the county should spend its cash settlement from the North Shore Road. More than 120 people came by the booth to share their opinion. Each person got 10 pennies to plunk in various jars according to how they’d like to see the money spent.

People could divvy up their pennies between jars, or dump them all in one. The jar labeled “teacher salaries” was the top winner. “Teacher salaries” got 27 percent of the vote, while “lower property taxes” came in second with 21 percent. More people would rather see teachers get paid more than see their own property taxes lowered, according to the poll.

Dedicating a portion of the road settlement money — a large portion, that is — would be the perfect solution to the teacher supplement challenge in Swain County, said Billy Richards, the real estate attorney in Bryson City. When the settlement arrives, it will shoot the “We’re a poor county” defense in the foot. The $52 million settlement would be held in a trust account, generating between $2.5 and $4 million in interest a year for county coffers.

The problem is, the settlement money could be a few years in the making, and when it does arrive, it could be appropriated in batches — not the full $52 million at one time. In the meantime, the teachers are still without a supplement.

Richards wonders whether county commissioners have the political will to find money in the budget for teacher supplements, and if not, to raise taxes.

“Nobody seems to get elected by proposing a tax increase but maybe a tax increase targeted specifically at teachers’ salaries is something people can get behind,” he said.

Richards has adopted the cause of teacher salaries as a personal project. Just before the start of the last school year, a teacher with an excellent reputation assigned to his daughter’s class was offered a job making more money in Macon County and accepted. The school system convinced a substitute teacher to take on the class, but by mid-year the substitute realized she didn’t want to teach full-time and quit. Another substitute taught the class for three weeks until the school landed a teacher who had just graduated during the winter semester from Western Carolina University. She was a great teacher, but at the end of the school year she too left for Macon County.

“We went through the steepest part of her learning curve and now she’s gone. As parents, it’s frustrating for you,” Richards said. “When your kids have a good teacher it is such a wonderful thing.”