While the final chapter is far from being written, it appears that the primary focus of the 2026 Mississippi legislative session will be teacher pay instead of school choice.

Nearly all of the talk before the three-month session began in early January was centered on the plans of House Speaker Jason White and Gov. Tate Reeves to greatly expand programs providing public funds to private schools. But support for the proposal has been lukewarm in White’s House and it appears to be practically non-existent in the Senate.

On the other hand, the Senate has passed a proposal to provide a $2,000 per year pay raise for kindergarten through 12th grade teachers and faculty at the community college and university level. The House has proposed an annual $5,000 pay raise for K-12 teachers.

No House or Senate member has voted against the teacher pay proposals. The two Republican-controlled chambers have to agree on a single plan to send to the governor. If the final number agreed to by legislators is closer to the speaker’s House plan, it would be one of the larger teacher pay increases in the state’s history.

Legislative leaders, especially Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, have been out front on the issue. Before the session began, Hosemann was advocating for a pay raise for Mississippi teachers, who are perennially at or near the bottom nationally when compared to teacher pay in other states.

On the other hand, Gov. Reeves has been quiet on the issue of a teacher pay raise.

Governors spell out their legislative priorities in their annual budget proposal, but in his document released before the 2026 session began, Reeves said nary a word about a teacher pay raise.

In terms of education, he focused on expanding school choice and charter schools and providing additional work force training.

Based on his public comments, Reeves has not been an advocate for what is potentially the biggest issue of the session.

Perhaps the governor, seeing the interest in a teacher pay raise in the Legislature, intended to talk about and even endorse the issue in his annual State of the State address. But thus far, his speech to a joint session of the Legislature has not come to fruition. It was scheduled for Feb. 4, but postponed after a massive ice storm pummeled the Delta and north Mississippi.

Whether the speech will be rescheduled remains to be seen. If not, it would mark the first time in modern memory for a Mississippi governor to eschew the State of the State.

This is not the first time Reeves has neglected the issue of a teacher pay raise.

In the 2019 campaign for governor, then-Lt. Gov. Reeves and the Democratic nominee, then-Attorney General Jim Hood, both proposed major pay raises for teachers.

But in his first budget proposal after becoming governor, Reeves did not include a teacher pay raise as a legislative priority, though he said it was important after reporters asked his office about it.

Despite Reeves leaving a pay raise out of his budget proposal for the 2020 session, the Legislature passed a $1,000 teacher pay raise for the fiscal year that began July 1 of that year. Reeves posted about the pay raise on social media as he signed it into law.

The next year, the state had unprecedented revenue reserves thanks in large part to federal COVID-19 spending, allowing the Legislature to pass a much larger pay raise of about $5,100. Reeves advocated for a smaller pay bump that year, but bragged as he signed the bill into law that the raise exceeded the $4,000 per year increase he promised on the 2019 campaign trail.

No doubt, Reeves will sign any teacher pay raise likely to be passed by the Legislature this session. And it is likely he will do so with a lot of pomp and circumstance, even though he has been quiet on the issue thus far.