The House is considering giving all Mississippi public school teachers a $5,000 annual pay raise starting next school year, a move that’s been long-called for by the state’s educators.
The bill would raise the state’s minimum annual teacher salary from $41,500 to $46,500, and would give special-education teachers an extra $3,000 a year.
The House teacher pay proposal tops one passed earlier by the Senate, which would provide a $2,000 a year increase.
The House Education Committee and House Appropriations Committee passed House Bill 1126 Tuesday afternoon before the deadline for lawmakers to pass legislation that originated in their respective chambers.
Rep. Jansen Owen, a Republican from Poplarville and author of the bill, said the raise has been a long time coming.
“Teachers work hard, and it’s key that we compensate them for the work that they do,” he said. “Education is key to economic development, personal growth and success in the workforce. So this has been a key goal of mine to continue growing our teachers’ salaries to at least be competitive with the regional averages.”
Mississippi teachers are, on average, the lowest paid in the country. The Legislature last meaningfully raised teacher pay in 2021, and educators say health insurance premium increases and inflation quickly ate up that raise.
Since then, teachers told Mississippi Today they’ve had to take second jobs and cut corners to make ends meet on their teacher salaries while the profession has gotten increasingly difficult.
The result: Thousands of teacher vacancies throughout the state.
House Bill 1126 is the chamber’s second lengthy omnibus bill this session that addresses a number of education issues, from school attendance officers’ roles to retirement eligibility.
The bill addresses superintendents’ pay, which some state leaders criticize, saying school funding disproportionately goes to administrative costs and salaries. It would cap school superintendents’ maximum pay at 250% of what they would make as a teacher on the pay scale in addition to the local supplement their district pays its teachers.
The bill creates an $18 million program that would temporarily give extra money to districts rated D or F to focus on targeted improvements and aims to help underperforming districts struggling with teacher shortages.
“These are districts that have legitimate issues that we’re trying to give (the Mississippi Department of Education) some money to go into and help,” said House Education Committee Chairman Rob Roberson, a Republican from Starkville. “This is not willy-nilly … We’re trying to figure out ways to find solutions.”
The legislation also includes a provision that would allow lawmakers to give assistant teachers a pay raise. The House’s earlier major education bill, House Bill 2, which included a $3,000 assistant teacher pay raise, was killed by the Senate Education Committee Tuesday afternoon.
The bill revises retirement eligibility provisions for law enforcement officers and other first responders, allowing them to retire earlier. It would also allow all other state employees hired after July 1, 2011, to retire at age 60 or at 30 years of service. Currently, state employees are required to log 35 years with the state before they can draw full benefits. First responders have been lobbying lawmakers for a special state retirement system after recent changes to the current one.
The state’s base student funding would increase by $500 under the bill increasing to $7,481 per student.
Additionally, school attendance and dropout prevention strategies would be reworked under the bill, including giving school attendance officers a pay raise and redesignating them as “student success and graduation coaches.”
Still, Rep. Omeria Scott, a Democrat from Laurel, expressed frustration at the House Appropriations Committee meeting that the bill would not do more to address chronic student absenteeism, which has more than doubled in Mississippi schools since 2018.
Scott wanted to add language to the bill that would require school attendance officers to immediately investigate why a student isn’t in school and to inform the student’s parents.
Roberson offered to work with Scott separately on the issue, but opposed her amendment. Scott said Republicans failed to include provisions important to House Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, in their education reform bills this session.
“I’m an African American woman sitting here in a state that is 40% Black, and I sit here listening to y’all talk about how schools are failing,” Scott said. “We try to put forward things that we think will help. When y’all put forward things that y’all think will help, we support it because we don’t walk in your shoes. We try to put forward things that we think will help because of the shoes that we walk in.”
Representatives at the education and appropriations committees did not receive copies of the bill in full. Instead, they were handed a page summarizing the bill in bullet points. Roberson acknowledged that the bill was likely still riddled with grammatical errors because it had been changed “so many times.”
To make and distribute copies of the full bill, “we would be here another three hours,” he said at the education committee meeting.
Owen said the bill’s authors had gone back and forth about where to focus the teacher pay supplement and how to structure the portion that gives additional support to D- and F-rated districts.
The Senate passed a teacher pay raise bill in early January that would increase salaries by $2,000, though the chamber’s leaders said they hope to raise that number by the end of the session. The House has not yet taken up the Senate bill.
Political reporter Michael Goldberg contributed to this report.
