Jason Reid’s day starts at 5 a.m.

He rolls out of bed, lets his dog out and drinks his first cup of coffee. After making sure his kids’ water bottles are full, Reid walks to nearby Lewisburg Elementary School. In the crisp air and dark morning, he starts a school bus, waiting for it to warm up.

Reid, a physical education teacher in DeSoto County School District, has been teaching for 17 years. But in 2019, he also started moonlighting as a bus driver to earn extra money.

This is a reality for educators in Mississippi, which has the nation’s lowest teacher pay. 

According to the National Education Association, the average teacher salary in Mississippi is $53,704. That’s $15,000 less than what the Economic Policy Institute says is needed to comfortably support a single parent, one child household in the Jackson metro area, which is $68,772. In DeSoto County, where Reid lives, that cost is even higher — $76,612 a year.

Even though some districts pay teachers more than the state minimum, without a spouse making higher pay, some educators say they have to keep second jobs and cut corners to make ends meet. 

Some promising young teachers — and even others with years of experience — are considering moving to other states where they are better compensated. 

Mississippi is up against a critical teacher shortage. Nearly 3,000 teacher jobs are vacant across the state, according to a 2024 survey conducted by the Mississippi Department of Education. Educators say the biggest contributing factor to those vacancies is low pay, according to the Mississippi Professional Educators’ annual survey.

Teacher vacancies mean bigger classrooms and less individualized time, which deeply impact student learning. Research shows that higher pay attracts quality teachers and incentivizes them to stay. 

On the heels of nationally recognized academic achievement in the state’s public schools, teachers say they deserve more. 

And legislators say they’re listening. The issue will likely be a hot topic during the 2026 legislative session. State leaders, such as Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, have indicated they’ll focus on raising teacher pay next year, and the Senate Education Committee met about the topic in October. House Speaker Jason White said this summer that his chamber will likely include all of its education policy, including school choice measures, in an omnibus bill next session.

Educators fear their salaries will get tied up in the controversial legislation.

“Teachers should not be held hostage and used as political pawns in order to gain support for another policy issue,” said Kelly Riley, executive director of Mississippi Professional Educators. “It appears to be another sign of disrespect for our educators and teaching profession as a whole.”

Legislators passed the last meaningful teacher pay raise in 2022, a historic increase of $5,140 on average per year. But teachers say that raise was almost immediately rendered null by health insurance premium increases and inflation.

And the retirement benefits that previously kept educators in the profession were changed earlier this year, when state legislators overhauled the public employee retirement system. Teachers who start after March 1, 2026, will receive fewer benefits than their peers. 

It’s a bleak outlook that young educators, such as second-year teacher Vivienne Diaz in Jackson, have to reckon with.

“I would like to stay in Mississippi, but after I finish my master’s degree, the amount of money I’d be making as a teacher …  after all these hours of work,” she said, “it’s just not worth it.”

‘A double kick to public school teachers’

Princess Thompson can smile about it now, but she remembers feeling shocked when she received her first paycheck 20 years ago. Her annual $24,000 salary translated to $1,300 a month.

“I asked my principal, ‘Is everything OK?’” said Thompson, who teaches music at an elementary school in Madison. “Me and another first-year teacher were like, ‘What happened here?’ Our principal laughed.”

Now, two decades into her career, her pay is better. But teaching has also gotten harder. Kids are entering kindergarten with learning difficulties that should have been addressed in preschool. She said that this generation of children, raised around screens, is difficult to keep engaged.

On the Gulf Coast, Carrie Bartlett’s older students are also easily distracted, and she reports more behavior issues in recent years. Without commensurate pay, it’s increasingly frustrating to deal with, she said.

Bartlett has been teaching social studies at Long Beach High School for 15 years, and her husband teaches at Long Beach Middle School. With a daughter in her sophomore year of high school and a son in college, their finances are tight.

When Bartlett and her colleagues commiserate, they echo the same sentiments about the job — they love being educators, but they wish they were getting compensated as professionals.

“I think that teaching is an important job, and it’s rewarding intrinsically,” Bartlett said. “I just wish it was more extrinsically rewarding and that the state had higher appreciation for us doing this job, educating the state’s future.” 

Despite talks about raising teacher pay next year, Bartlett doesn’t feel appreciated. Adding insult to injury are state leaders’ discussions about expanding school choice, or policies to fund education outside of public schools, she said. 

“Pay raises should continue regularly and not be attached to political footballs, which is what I fear will happen this year,” she said. “It’s a double kick to public school teachers.”

Rising health insurance costs

The worst part about being a teacher? According to Reid — and educators across the state surveyed by the teachers association — it’s the health insurance premiums. 

When the state raised teacher pay in 2022, the monthly cost for teachers to insure themselves and their families was around $700. 

Four years later, that’s up to about $900 a month, or $10,800 a year. It’s an annual increase of $2,400. For a teacher with 10 years of experience and a master’s degree, that’s more than a fifth of their salary. At the same time, deductibles have gone up.

Rising premiums are a major part of what’s driving teachers away from the sector, said Megan Boren, who leads teacher workforce policy efforts for the Southern Regional Education Board, a nonprofit focused on improving education. In October, Boren spoke to Mississippi senators about challenges facing the education system nationwide and in the South. During that presentation, she said health insurance premiums have gone down in the region, largely due to reductions in two Southern states with some of the highest premiums. 

In Mississippi and most of the region, costs keep going up.

“Typically, older and more experienced teachers are the ones who have a family to cover,” she told Mississippi Today. “When you factor in premiums for a family, those teachers’ net pay has decreased because of that significantly increased cost.”

Reid has had cancer twice. During his second round of treatment in 2022, his deductible was $13,000. He met the deductible early on, but still spent a huge chunk of money, he said. And as a teacher, there’s not an option to take paid medical leave.

“We go on vacation … we’re not living paycheck to paycheck,” he said. “But we can’t live the lifestyle a lot of neighbors would live.”

Reid’s wife also drives a school bus to supplement their income. Their kids are limited to one sport each. The family used just one car to get around for a long time. And for a year, they made do with a mostly broken washer. 

It’s not what a 17-year classroom veteran deserves, he said. 

After a quarter century in the classroom, Julie Price, a third grade reading and social studies teacher in Pearl, is getting paid less than her son in his first year as a civil engineer at the Mississippi Department of Transportation. 

“I’m proud of him, and I know the job is challenging and complicated,” she said. “But that was a slap in the face.” 

Though Price is too invested in her life in Mississippi to leave, temptation lingers. In her home state of Alabama, just a few hours away, she’d be paid almost $10,000 more each year, she said.  

Price’s husband died from COVID-19 complications in January 2021. Abruptly going from two salaries to one, right as her son was headed to college, was hard — and still is, she said. 

Recently, Price had to renew her car tag, a $300 expense that she didn’t budget for. She and her son only eat out once a week. And without meeting her deductible, going to the doctor for continuing neck issues has been expensive. 

“If you don’t have some cushion in there, you’d wipe your money out,” Price said. “Then how would you live?”

To attract quality people to the profession in Mississippi, Reid said, pay raises need to be frequent and substantial.

“Politicians can’t raise pay once and take three to four years off in between election cycles because these pay raises degrade so quickly,” he said. 

“If we want our schools to be great, we’ve got to pay for that.”

Can Mississippi teachers afford to stay?

Vivienne Diaz, a 23-year-old who teaches juniors and seniors at Jackson’s Jim Hill High School, is at the dawn of her career. 

What she sees ahead makes her nervous. 

Diaz, the daughter of a teacher, didn’t go in blind. She knew her pay wouldn’t reflect the hours she’d spend outside of the classroom, planning her lessons and sponsoring a club. With her free time, Diaz helps plan educational programming and teaches at her synagogue on Sundays, which brings in around $200 a month. 

“My senior year, I told my mom, ‘I’ll never be a teacher. I see how you get treated,’” she said. “It is just as difficult as I knew it was going to be.”

But she loves mentoring her students, getting to watch them bloom and being part of the process. That’s why she became a teacher, despite the challenges. 

Still, when Diaz finishes her master’s degree in teaching, it doesn’t financially make sense for her to stay, no matter how much she loves teaching. She’s looking into schools in other states or a job in Mississippi in another field.

Diaz is exactly the kind of person Mississippi leaders want to keep around — a young, smart professional who might make her home and raise her family here. A pay raise is the bare minimum state leaders could do to keep people like Diaz in Mississippi, said Boren of SREB. 

“It’s really important for state leaders to recognize that the work here to help kind of restore faith in the profession, restore those wanting to come in and stay in the profession, it’s a comprehensive approach,” Boren said. “There’s not one silver bullet. Increasing pay alone is not going to cover it. 

“That’s not always what our leaders want to hear. They want to hear what’s the solution and how to fix it now, and I sympathize with that, but the solution is a comprehensive plan and a comprehensive investment in our educators and in the profession as a whole.”

Diaz might reconsider if lawmakers pass a substantial raise, she said. But even then, she’d think twice.

“I love watching my students learn and develop and become new people,” Diaz said. “But just because I have that heart doesn’t mean I don’t deserve that good paycheck.”