The Mississippi Senate passed House Bill 852 on Thursday, offering a $1,000 raise to all teachers and rewarding new teachers with $1,100 “in an effort to make jobs more attractive.”
“We will not play politics with our teachers’ future,” David Blount, vice chairman of the Senate Democratic Caucus, said in a tweet on Tuesday. “We are acting in unified, bipartisan support of our teachers.”
Many people in Mississippi believe the bill is a step in the right direction for the state.
Blake Adams, program coordinator for the Mississippi Excellence in Teaching Program (METP), said that the increase in pay is long overdue. He also said that the pay structure is not properly designed to encourage students to enter the teaching profession and stay in the state.
“We know we have some extremely great teachers and talent here, and we need to reduce the export of that talent and increasing teacher pay also increases the import of talent,” Adams said.
Adams believes that the state should work to bring in more educators from outside of Mississippi, but he also believes it is important to incentivize Mississippi natives to stay and teach here because they “know and look like Mississippi.”
Mississippi has some of the lowest teacher salaries in the United States. According to the Southern Regional Education Board, the annual starting salary for teachers in Mississippi is a little over $35,000. However, the take-home pay is about $25,500.
During his election campaign in 2019, now-Gov. Tate Reeves presented a four-year plan to increase teacher salaries.
“We do know that there’s not a teacher in the state that makes what they are worth,” Reeves said during a press conference in 2019. “As governor, I want you to know that I’ll support our teachers.”
Reeves proposed a $4,200 increase to teacher salaries over the course of four years. In the first year, the salary would increase by $1,500; $1,000 in the second year; $1,000 in the third year and $800 in the fourth year. He also proposed increasing state spending from $12 million to $24 million for classroom supplies.
Reeves said he would like to pay teachers in Mississippi the Southeastern average rate, which is just over $47,000. He also said that he would sign any teacher pay raise bills that legislators pass.
Reeves’s full proposed plan has not been approved.
According to Mississippi Today, 54 school districts and charter schools in the state are experiencing a teacher shortage, largely caused by the low salaries that the schools are offering.
A teacher shortage is declared when a school district has 60 or more teaching positions and 10% of those are not appropriately licensed, which includes teachers teaching out of their fields, teachers teaching with no certification and long-term substitute teachers.
According to a study conducted by Mississippi First, educator preparation programs in the state experienced a 32% decrease from the 2013-14 school year to the 2017-18 school year. The out-of-state pipeline for teachers declined by 96% during those four years.
Mississippi teachers also earn $6,000 less than teachers in neighboring states and over $20,000 less than the average Mississippian with a bachelor’s degree, according to Mississippi First.
Azurrea Curry, a freshman education major, believes that increasing the pay for teachers is an important step in encouraging teachers to stay in the state.
“Teaching in Mississippi can be a hard task. A lot of times, people tell you not to teach at all, and certainly not in Mississippi,” Curry said. “Increasing the pay is sort of an incentive for some (people), and it could be the deciding factor between staying and leaving.”
Curry is a part of METP, and she plans to stay in the state after graduation.
METP is a collaboration between the University of Mississippi and Mississippi State University to attract top-performing students through scholarships and experiences. The program trains secondary English, mathematics and science teachers and elementary and special education teachers. As a member of the program, students commit to teaching for five years in a Mississippi public school after graduation.
Although the state is working to increase wages for teachers, some people do not believe the pay is increasing enough.
One Twitter user, Chris Wright, called the increase “a slap in the face to hard-working teachers.”
“Good teachers will continue leaving as long as Mississippi continues to not care about paying their teachers what they are worth,” he wrote.
Adams, the METP coordinator, believes that pay impacts the perception of the teaching profession, which gives parents, peers and society the “fuel” to push students away from the profession as a whole.
“We should pay teachers on the same range as what a nurse, other health care professional, or a frontline worker gets paid because if we didn’t have teachers, we wouldn’t have engineers, nurses, doctors or lawyers,” Adams said. “(Teaching) is the cornerstone of our foundation, and we should treat it as such.”
