![]() ![]() Increasing pay was one of the recommendations from the governor’s teacher shortage task force as a way to attract and retain educators. Texas ranks 28th in the nation for teacher pay, $7,652 less than the national average, according to the latest National Education Association report. ![]() “We have so much money that the decision not to help our teachers and our students is immoral to me.” “We have teachers in our state who are driving Ubers at night and selling their own blood plasma for extra money,” he said. James Talarico, D-Austin, the lawmaker who had proposed giving all Texas teachers a $15,000 raise, said he’s glad lawmakers are still considering some kind of pay bump, but the remaining proposals don’t offer teachers nearly enough. Under HB 100, that teacher would need to be paid at least $55,000 if they don’t have a teaching certificate and at least $60,000 if they do.īut the raise teachers would receive from King’s bill is far from what they had hoped, with some estimates showing teachers would get about an extra $100 a month in their paychecks at best. Currently, a teacher with 10 years of experience has to be paid at least $45,630. The bill also updates the base amount of money that teachers should make depending on their experience. It would also require districts, which currently have to use 30% of the state funds they receive to pay for employee raises, to increase that share to 50%. HB 100 would raise the district’s allotment per student to $6,250 next school year and to $6,300 in 2025, when the state would consider raising that amount more to account for inflation. The bill is the lower chamber’s response to the recommendations of a task force formed last year by Abbott to look into the causes of the state’s teacher shortage. In the lower chamber, HB 100 would raise the base amount of money a district gets per student, which is currently $6,160 per student and has not increased since 2019. “But they were either lazy on how they put together or didn’t really think it through.” “I do think that at least for somebody, somewhere, there was a legitimate concern for what we do for rural teachers that are at the lower salary schedules, because they also are in a crisis,” he said. Zeph Capo, president of Texas American Federation of Teachers, questioned how much thought went into deciding who gets a raise. “The size of the campus doesn’t devalue my passion,” she said. Chana Jones, a kindergarten teacher at Snyder ISD, a district with less than 3,000 students about an hour and a half away from Midland, would get the $6,000 bonus but said she doesn’t think the raise is a fair assessment of Texas teachers. Some teachers said they should all be valued the same. Costs of living are usually higher in larger metropolitan areas. Creighton has said the $6,000 bonus is aimed at helping rural school teachers, as they are usually paid less than their urban and suburban counterparts.Ī Texas Tribune analysis shows that teachers in major suburban and urban school districts get paid an average of about $61,432, almost $10,000 more than those teaching in rural areas. Teachers and unions have criticized the use of districts’ student enrollment to decide which educators get the bigger bonus, saying it’s a less-than-ideal way to determine who needs the money the most. It was voted out of the Senate and still needs House approval before going to Gov. SB 9 would give teachers a one-time bonus of $2,000, plus an additional $4,000 for those who work in districts with less than 20,000 students. “I’ve been in this long enough that it just gets demoralizing,” Lanoux said. There are still avenues through which big raises could get approved, but it’s becoming an increasingly unlikely scenario.Ĭecil Lanoux, a teacher at North East Independent School District in San Antonio who has been an educator since 1999, said he’s used to hearing legislators float the idea of giving teachers a big raise every session, but this year, the possibility that lawmakers might use some of the surplus to help fund big raises had him “pretty darn excited.” Now that the more generous proposals are all but dead, he feels that the ones still on the table will fall short as usual. ![]()
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