CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Administrators in West Virginia’s Kanawha County Schools are suggesting schools should cut back on hand soap for students to help pay for teacher raises approved by the school board.

“We were looking at across the board raises for teachers and service personnel and therefore we were cutting back certain line items,” superintendent Ron Duering told WOWK TV.

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“I don’t think it is unreasonable,” he said. “You never know until you try something. You can’t condemn it unless you try it. It was just one suggestion.”

That suggestion – to try limiting student’s use of hand soap – was floated by district maintenance director Terry Hollandsworth in an email sent out to principals and intercepted by the news station.

“Nobody was making it a policy that we were going to have to follow through on it,” Hollandsworth said.

The suggestion came as one of several ways schools could cut spending on maintenance and custodial supplies. The district is aiming to reduce those expenses by 5 to 10 percent to help fund the teacher raises.

The district’s purchasing department spent $46,130.48 on hand soap for student and staff last year, and a retired custodian had shared with Hollandsworth a way the district cut reduce that expense, the maintenance supervisor told the news station in an email.

“She would take a rubber band and wrap around and around the pump mechanism to restrict its travel,” Hollandsworth wrote. “Thus a smaller amount would be put in their hands and children being wired to use the full stroke of the pump would get a smaller amount of soap.”

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The cut-down-on-handsoap email comes about two months after school board members voted or across-the-board raises for teachers, service workers, administrators and superintendent Duering, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

“The 2 percent raises for professional educators like teachers and principals and 1 percent raises for service workers like cooks and bus drivers are the first across-the-board local raises in about a decade for school employees, who have received separate raises from the state in that time. Teachers statewide got a $1,000 increase under Senate Bill 391, which passed last year,” the news site reports.

“The administrator pay raises — which the board first implemented this semester to compensate for hours that Superintendent Ron Duerring said school leaders are already required to work supervising certain games and tournaments — will be worth $11,700 for high school principals in 2015-16, $7,900 for middle school principals, $6,300 for high school assistant principals and $4,600 for middle school assistant principals.”

The extracurricular raises for administrators alone will cost the district $400,000. Duerring’s raise, approved the month prior, will tack another $3,150 onto his $160,700 annual salary, the Gazette-Mail reports.

“I mean I’ve got to think there are some more effective ways to cut costs from an educational standpoint than to minimize hand soap,” parent Brooks Crislip told WOWK TV.

Board member Pete Thaw – the only board member to vote against the school budget that contained employee raises – agrees with Crislip.

“If we are giving principals $11,000 pay raises we have no business putting rubber bands on the soap dispensers,” he said.

Duerring, likely sensing the public’s frustration, told the news station that the district may not have to cut the custodial budget after all.

“Actually given our carry over we are going to be able to restore some of those finds throughout the year so there shouldn’t be an issue now,” Duerring wrote in an email to WOWK TV.