Teachers, staff receive over $1,000 in bonuses in Milan

MILAN, Tenn. — A local school district gave big bonuses to teachers and staff.

The Milan Special School District started back to school in August, offering in-person and virtual options for students.

Milan Special School District Director Jonathan Criswell says, through all the restrictions and safety measures, teachers and staff have stayed strong.

“We’re asking teachers and staff that we take care of both our virtual people and our in-person learners. They’ve done a great job of going above and beyond all through the pandemic,” Criswell said.

That’s why the school district has elected to give them a sizable bonus.

“We offered our certified employees $2,000, and our non-certified employees $1,500,” Criswell said.

The bonus goes to all teachers and staff in the school district — cafeteria workers, bus drivers, secretaries, and more — totaling almost 300 people. Many of whom volunteered to help deliver meals last spring, after schools shut down.

“Our employees came back in, volunteered by packing lunches, serving lunches, rode buses all across our school district to be able to distribute meals. We were up to about 10,000 meals a week,” Criswell said.

Criswell says the mix of federal funding and state funding gave them plenty of money to work with, even after paying for increased health measures.

“We received around $400,000 in federal money, and then the second round was about 1.5 million. We’ll have to buy hand sanitizer, we’ll have to do all the things we did at the beginning of this school year for the first round of federal money,” Criswell said.

There’s a possibility of even more coming with the recent stimulus bill.

Thanks to this, the school district is going to come out of COVID-19 with happy staff and a good financial outlook.

“So we’ll take the additional federal money, set that aside for future purposes, to make sure we can sustain what we’ve created in the last year or so,” Criswell said.

Criswell says they have a goal of getting the middle to high school student ratio of 1:1.