As state revenue falls and the governor and Legislature impose cut after cut on all state agencies, educational institutions are putting off hiring, laying off employees while remaining employees are facing stagnant wages, pay cuts and furloughs.

At the University of West Georgia, the last across-the-board raises were approved in fiscal year 2008 and became active Jan. 1, 2009. The fiscal year 2010 budget does not include raises and fiscal year 2011 probably won’t either as the budget is continually stretched thinner and thinner by more state funding cuts.

The one exception would be employees who get a promotion. If an employee becomes eligible for a promotion to a higher position and wins that job, her or she would receive the pay appropriate to the promotion, said Rob Douthit, spokesman for the university.

At the same time employees’ wages are frozen, they are also paying approximately 20 percent higher insurance costs because of changes instituted to the health insurance program, another repercussion of the lean budget. The university also instituted furloughs this school year. Six are already scheduled and the school is looking at scheduling four more should the budget need further cuts.

West Georgia Technical College employees are also enduring furloughs. The school imposed the three furlough days this school year that the governor mandated. The employees are shouldering an average of 7.5 percent more of the cost of their benefits as well.

To help shelter the employees from more cuts, the college is doing some creative cutting.

“One of the other cost savings measures that we’ve done as a college is we’ve asked our administrative senior staff as well as faculty to perhaps teach an extra class or to teach a class that they’re qualified to teach,” said Dawn Cook, vice president of institutional advancement. “We have a lot of very credentialed employees on both our administrative and senior staff. We have not made that a requirement. We have simply asked those folks to step up and to help teach an extra class if their schedules allow.”

Public K-12 school systems’ payrolls are set and funded by the state. Teachers are paid on the basis of their education and experience. If the teachers reach a certain level of experience or education, they are given a step raise into the next category. There were no raises last year, except for step raises. Those raises were still in effect for this school year, said Greg Denney, chief financial officer for Carroll County Schools.

“They did not freeze step raises last year,” Denney said. “So, if you were eligible for a step raise in our school system last year, you got a step raise.”

It’s been a couple of years since the teachers saw a raise in the pay scale, though.

“It would be FY08, so it would be school year 2007-2008,” said Dr. Kent Edwards, assistant superintendent at the Carrollton City Schools.

The state is looking at suspending the current pay scale all together for three years beginning next school year, he said. The governor has also proposed an additional three furlough days for school employees.

At Carroll County Schools, employees received a 1 percent pay cut this year to help balance the budget. Then, as the school year began, the governor made more cuts in the form of three furlough days at all schools. The employees at Carroll County Schools were spared half a furlough day, but the other 2.5 furloughs the employees did have to take is the equivalent of receiving another 1 percent pay cut.

Carrollton City Schools decided to absorb the equivalent of the cost of the three furlough days cut and did not impose the furloughs for its employees. But the employees are feeling the cuts in their benefits. The system dropped an after-school care program that some employees took advantage of with their own children. In addition, the employees are paying more for insurance this year.

“Those are the kinds of things, they’re hidden cuts,” Edwards said. “They’re certainly being felt by the employees and their families.”

The additional furlough days and deeper cuts in the proposed amended 2010 budget also mean that public school employees may see more payroll pain by the end of the year.

“The likelihood of us having to do something along the line of furloughs is much more probable than the first one,” Edwards said. “In addition to reducing our QBE (Quality Basic Education, the state’s education funding formula) by an equivalent amount of three furlough days, they also imposed in this year’s budget a reduction that was equivalent to 1 percent.”

For the Carrollton system, the cuts total about $500,000, and that is hard to cut from a budget that the school system is already halfway through.

All the schools are suffering through the cuts but are working hard to maintain quality in the classrooms.

“We do realize and recognize the seriousness of the budget shortfalls,” West Georgia Tech’s Cook said. “But we have made a commitment to continue to provide excellent and exemplary customer service to our student base and to help prepare the workforce in the west Georgia region. That’s not going to change because of the budget shortfalls.”