Alamance-Burlington school officials are looking at the possibility of transferring its classified employees – i.e., those whose positions don’t require a state educator’s license – from being employed by ABSS to being contract employees of a staffing firm based in Tennessee.
Originally, the school board had been scheduled in June to consider awarding a contract to Noor Staffing Group in New York City to fill approximately 25 full- and part-time vacancies within the Child Nutrition department during the 2026-27 fiscal year, ABSS officials told The Alamance News at the time. ABSS would’ve paid Noor $20.24 per hour (or up to $150,000), per the terms of the contract.
However, Noor rescinded its bid on June 16, and the ABSS administration subsequently exercised its right to rescind all bids, school officials confirmed for the newspaper late last month.
Meanwhile, on Monday night, the school board heard a proposal from a different firm – Education Staffing Services (ESS), which is based in Knoxville, Tennessee and Cherry Hill, New Jersey – about the possibility of taking over recruiting, hiring, training, and supervising teaching assistants, should the board vote to award a contract to the company at a future meeting.
School officials say the change could help ABSS rein in its costs for employer-matching contributions to the state health insurance and retirement plans that most full-time public school employees receive as part of their benefits package.
At the same time, ABSS superintendent Dr. Aaron Fleming told school board members Monday night that the shift would likely start with a small portion of the approximately 900 classified employees currently on the school system’s payroll. In addition to TAs, classified employees include clerical workers, skilled craftsmen, maintenance workers, technicians, bus drivers, and other positions that don’t require a state teaching license.
The company’s presentation focused mainly on recruiting, hiring, training, and overseeing new TAs, as well as existing ones with fewer than five years’ experience with ABSS. A contract with ESS could be expanded later to include other categories of classified employees, based on Monday night’s discussion.
The superintendent assured the board that existing classified employees would have the option to “go on contract” with ESS employees or to remain ABSS employees.
“We do have some folks that want to have a conversation with us [about] how to have some savings on costs incurred on hiring our own employees,” Fleming said. “We felt like we needed to hear from the private industry side how contracting would go in order to save on some of our costs.”
The school system currently has 135 TA positions, not including vacancies, ABSS chief finance officer Tony Messer said Monday night. Of those, 46 have five years’ or less experience with ABSS, he said, adding, “Odds are, they’re not going to stay for the next 20 years and retire.
“Every penny we pay, the state of North Carolina keeps that money,” Messer told the board. “The [employer matching retirement and healthcare] contributions we put in, they get. If every one of our TAs were contracted, we would save annually right around $2 million.”
ABSS assistant superintendent of human resources Yolanda Anderson told the board Monday night that most TA vacancies are at the elementary school level. “Currently, we’re showing seven – remember these numbers change – for general education,” she said. ABSS currently has three vacant TA positions within the Exceptional Children’s (EC) program at the elementary schools; no vacant TA positions at the middle school level; and eight EC adapted curriculum vacancies at the high school level, Anderson said.
Company representative: ABSS could save $10k annually per TA
“A lot of people don’t realize you’re looking at about $15,000 to $20,000 to hire a teacher,” Robbie Nelson, vice president of business development for ESS, told the school board Monday night. “That does not include their salary, so that cost is exponential…This program is really geared toward your lower-tier positions, your teacher assistant type position, people that are making $22,000 to $28,000 a year.”
For an example, Nelson said that the annual cost to ABSS for a TA totals $47,279.57, which includes: $28,463.50 for the actual salary, plus $18,816.07 in related costs such as payroll taxes, state healthcare coverage, a 26.1 percent retirement contribution, and worker’s compensation insurance.
By contracting with his company, ABSS could reduce its cost for each TA position by $10,332.48 – to an actual cost of $36,974.09 per TA – Nelson said. ESS would pay the salary, benefits, and all related expenses for each contracted position, he said.
Nelson said that the cost for the company’s service is “29 percent markup” of the pay rate, which he explained is the difference between the cost for a contracted TA ($36,974.09), minus the actual annual salary for a TA ($28,463.50).
Nelson said that the shift would be made through an “attrition model,” meaning that when classified employees resign or retire from ABSS, their positions would be shifted to contracted positions. The new “contract” employees would be hired, trained, and paid by ESS, he said, adding that school principals and assistant principals would continue to have a hand in the recruitment process.
“We don’t want to affect anyone with their pension that’s been here for 10, 15 years,” Nelson said. “But what we’ve seen in most districts is high turnover right now. We’re here to help you with those employees and fill those vacancies.”
The company “has become known as the top provider of substitute teachers,” particularly in Georgia and Florida, and said approximately 15 N.C. school systems have contracted with ESS, Nelson told the board Monday night. The company is saving the Iredell-Statesville school system $1.2 million per year, Nelson said. “That’s a lot of money going back into your district,” he said.
The public school systems in Beaufort, Craven, and Person County, as well as Kannapolis city schools, have recently “come on board” with ESS, Nelson said Monday night.
ESS also contracts with Chatham County schools, where Messer had previously served as CFO until beginning his tenure with ABSS in October 2024.
On the other hand, Pitt County schools terminated its contract with ESS for filling substitute teaching positions at the end of the 2025-26 fiscal year, after school officials in that school system determined they could save between $2 million and $3 million per year by handling those duties in-house, The (Greenville) Daily Reflector reported earlier this year.
Pitt County schools began outsourcing substitute teaching positions in 2021 due to staffing shortages amid the Covid-19 pandemic but later found that its costs for the staffing services had “skyrocketed,” to $5.1 million for the 2024-25 school year, versus $1.24 million spent on substitute teachers prior to the pandemic, the Greenville paper reported.
Warren County schools also ended its contract for substitute teacher staffing services with ESS earlier this year, after Warren County school officials concluded that handling those duties in-house would save about $220,000 per year in administrative costs, according to news reports that ran in March.
Contracted employees would be paid weekly, but benefits would be competitive with state plan
Contracted employees would be paid weekly and would also be eligible for 401K retirement benefits, with what he termed a “discretionary company match,” and healthcare coverage. “It’s great healthcare,” Nelson said, though he didn’t delve into specifics.
Fleming acknowledged later during the discussion that contracted employees wouldn’t automatically receive a raise if the General Assembly includes raises for school employees in the state’s biennial budget.
However, the superintendent said that ABSS would still have the state funding for the contracted positions, and its savings could be used to increase pay for contracted employees.
Nelson said that ESS has contracts with K-12 public school systems in 38 states and provides benefits packages for those positions. “Still, it’s not going to compete with your state benefits,” he conceded.
Approximately 35 percent of other categories of ABSS classified employees, such as office workers, have five years’ of experience or less, Messer said. “So the state benefits [are] not keeping people here,” he said.
Another representative from ESS told school board members Monday night that ESS would recruit new employees in Alamance County by getting involved with “local community groups” such as parent-teacher organizations and the chamber of commerce, along with having a presence in car-rider lines at schools.
“I think if we do something like this, we need to start small, with new employees, so we’re all getting used to having those employees contracted,” Fleming told
School board members indicated an interest in resuming the discussion at a future meeting, while also expressing reservations about whether employees would be Alamance County residents and whether the company’s healthcare coverage and retirement benefits would be commensurate with those that are currently funded by the General Assembly.
ESS describes itself as a “family” of education service and staffing companies that include Proximity Learning, PSI, Enriched, ESS Clinical, and several others, according to its website.
