The Alamance-Burlington school system now has 44 employees whose salaries top $100,000 or more.
That’s out of a total of 3,872 positions, including all full-time and part-time employees, as well as temporary employees such as exam proctors.
Some250 positions were listed as vacant at the time that ABSS furnished the salaries in response to a public records request earlier this year by The Alamance News.
As it had for other local governments in the county, the newspaper asked the school system for the following information for all ABSS employees, all of which is to be publicly available by statute:
- Full name;
- Date of hire;
- Current job title/assigned station;
- Current annual salary, as of February 1, 2025;
- Total salary compensation for those same employees during the 2024 calendar year, including base annual or hourly pay, plus any amounts paid for additional duties, bonuses, overtime, longevity pay, employer-matching contributions for healthcare and/or dental coverage for the employee and dependents, as well as employer-matching retirement contributions.
The salary information furnished by ABSS, however, lacked the requested breakdown for the value of employee benefits. ABSS assistant superintendent of finance Tony Messer previously told the newspaper that about 20 percent of each employee’s salary represents the value of benefits such as employer-matching contributions to retirement and health insurance.
The information provided by ABSS also lacked the specific job titles and/or assigned locations that the newspaper had requested for each employee, instead providing a partial list of site identification “codes” used by the state Department of Public Information (DPI).
In such cases, and where possible, the newspaper has cross-referenced the publicly-available staff directories from ABSS to determine the current positions for all employees earning $100,000 or more. [The staff directory information from ABSS is deemed reliable but may contain errors.]
The salary information provided by ABSS listed numerous employees’ names with multiple salary lines, followed by multiple supplement lines, but lacked the total amount of compensation for each person.
For example, the salary information for ABSS superintendent Dr. Aaron Fleming, whose job title was listed simply as “Administrators,” included four entries indicating his yearly salary as: administrators, $153,267.43; administrators, $79,732.61; local salary 12 months, $12,000 (presumably referring to a portion of his salary that is county-funded); and a retirement reimbursement of $14,700.
In a subsequent request to Fleming, the newspaper noted that “missing altogether is the last requested item,” total salary compensation, plus a breakdown of the value of benefits paid on behalf of the employee.
Alamance-Burlington school officials told The Alamance News that they could not provide the requested total compensation or value of benefits because they do not maintain that information in that format.
In order to arrive at a total amount of compensation that would be easily understood by the average person, the newspaper ran the original salary data furnished by ABSS through a computer program to calculate the total compensation for each person. [The calculated total compensation, which is listed in the accompanying chart under “amount,” matches the original dataset exactly and is deemed reliable but may contain errors.]
A future installment on the salaries for ABSS employees will include a listing, in which each person’s name appears only once and all salary lines are calculated into a single “yearly salary” value.
The newspaper’s analysis revealed that, of the 44 highest-paid employees, 27 are principals. Six are high school principals. The principal of Graham High School is excluded from that category. That position was vacant for part of the 2024-25 and subsequently filled by Revonda Johnson, who resigned as the chief academic officer for ABSS in the spring of 2025 and completed the remaining three months of the 2024-25 fiscal year as the interim principal at Graham High School until her retirement in June.
Also earning more than $100,000 are six of the seven ABSS middle school principals (with Graham Middle School’s principal excluded) and 11 of the 20 elementary school principals.
The principals at three nontraditional schools – the Alamance Virtual School and Ray Street Academy, which serve students in grades six through 12, and the Early College housed at Alamance Community College that serves high school students – also earn more than $100,000 in annual compensation, based on the information provided by ABSS.
The state-funded base annual salaries for principals are based on the state salary schedules adopted by the General Assembly for each fiscal year. Principals’ salaries also vary according to the enrollment of the school to which he or she is assigned and whether their students met or exceeded expected academic growth as measured by End-of-Grade and End-of-Course exams.
Additionally, all ABSS principals, assistant principals, teachers, and some administrators receive a county-funded supplement, which is paid as a percentage on top of their base annual salaries and is based on the consecutive number of years of employment with the school system.
For those ABSS principals currently earning more than $100,000, the total amount of their compensation ranges between $144,544.68 on the high end (the total base salary, benefits, and supplement paid to Harold “Bear” Bryant, principal of Western High School) and $101,126.89 on the low end (the total base salary, benefits, and supplement paid to Steven Fine, principal at Garrett Elementary School).
The remaining 17 of the 44 highest-paid ABSS employees are based primarily at the school system’s Central Office on Vaughn Road in Burlington.
Aside from Fleming, who as superintendent is the highest-paid employee in ABSS, the salaries for Central Office directors and members of the superintendent’s “cabinet” range between $170,000.09 on the high end (for assistant superintendent of finance Tony Messer, who came to ABSS a month after Fleming began his tenure in September 2024) and $101,863.80 at the low end (for Julie Cozort, director of student information systems and data integration, who has been with ABSS since October 1999).
Some positions – such as the assistant superintendent of operations and other employees within that division – are based on salary ranges set by the state but are statutorily required to be funded by county government. State law delegates the responsibility for overseeing and funding the construction and maintenance of public school facilities to the county government in which they’re located, the finance officer said in an earlier interview.
Though the salaries listed nearby are based on the state’s salary schedules for 2024-25, they remain current due to the ongoing budget impasse between the two chambers of the General Assembly.
The General Assembly voted in late July 2025 to adopt a “mini-budget” that provided “step” adjustments in the salary schedules but didn’t include raises promised earlier this year for school employees and other state employees. As such, the state continues to operate at the same funding levels provided under the previous biennial budget that the General Assembly passed in the fall of 2023.
[Some of the highest-paid ABSS employees have received raises and/or salary adjustments since the school system furnished the salaries earlier this year. The newspaper has requested, but not yet received, the previous and current salaries for each employee, as approved by the school board between July 24 and December 1 of this year.]
