ST. LOUIS — Starting pay for Missouri teachers will soon rise from $25,000 a year to at least $40,000 thanks to a sweeping new bill that boosts education funding across the state.
Teachers and education advocates have fought for years to improve starting teacher salaries, which rank among the lowest in the country. Yet many districts and advocates say they don't believe the bill laid out a clear path for how those increases will be funded. The Missouri School Boards' Association received at least 200 letters from school officials asking the governor to veto the legislation before he signed it into law, said Caitlyn Whaley, outreach director for the organization.
Some school leaders, like Webb City School District Superintendent Anthony Rossetti, say without consistent funding this new policy has the potential to "decimate" smaller districts.
"You're promising some things that I don't know that you can deliver on," Rosetti said. "We're the ones who are going to be holding the bag if it doesn't get funded."
The increases, part of a package signed into law by Republican Gov. Mike Parson last month, are set to go into effect at the start of the 2025-2026 school year.
Aside from raising the starting teacher salary, the law also boosted minimum salaries for educators with master's degrees and 10-plus years of experience to $48,000 by 2027. It also increased all the state's teacher salaries by the January Consumer Price Index report, with a 3 percent annual cap.
"Since the beginning of our administration, we've looked at ways to increase teacher pay and reward our educators for the hard work they do, and this legislation helps us continue that progress," Parson said in a statement.
Both Rossetti and Joplin Schools Superintendent Kerry Sachetta signed a letter in April requesting a veto of the bill. It represented 41 public school districts and the Southwest Center for Educational Excellence. The letter said schools agreed with the raises, but did not agree with the "lack of any guarantees" for how they will be funded.
Without those future guarantees, "this bill is nothing more than the state writing checks in the future that it doesn't know if it will be able to cash. However, our local school districts will be saddled with the tab," the letter said.
Rossetti stressed that the future is unknown. In his more than 20 years in his role, he said he's seen a number of shortfalls in funding for public schools. He believes if the Legislature can't fulfill what it has laid out in the bill, it could leave districts to make some tough choices.
"Either teachers are going to get sent home because you're not going to have enough money to pay everybody, or that district is going to consolidate, or the third thing, which is a possibility, is that districts will have to sue the state to get those dollars that they'll need to survive," he said.
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson takes a tour of Kickapoo High School in September 2023.
Thomas Toch, director of FutureEd, an independent think tank at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy, said the group, which seeks to improve opportunities for traditionally underserved students in both secondary and higher education, has noticed two things when it comes to how states, many of them led by Republican lawmakers, are raising teacher pay across the country.
Many of these efforts are also tied to initiatives to increase the use of public monies in private schools, Toch said. This includes at least a dozen states, including Missouri, that have in recent years enacted or expanded education savings account programs, which would in part allow families to use taxpayer money toward private school expenses.
That could end up becoming a strain on the state's budget, Toch said.
Second, more red states are giving school districts the responsibility for setting a salary structure. Arkansas legislators passed the LEARNS Act, which increased the minimum teacher salary to $50,000. The law also eliminated the state's pay schedule, which allowed for increases for teachers with more education and experience in the field.
While Toch said the increase in pay for teachers across the board is overdue, "it's one thing to declare that teachers will be paid more money, it's another thing to find the money."
"The question is: Will legislators, will state leaders be willing to continue to pay those additional hundreds of millions of dollars," Toch said. "It's an open question."
What else is in the bill?
The bill was originally a 12-page proposal to grow MOScholars, the state's tax credit scholarship program, which the Legislature established through a bill in 2021.
It expands the scholarship program for students with IEPs, or those who live in low-income households, to attend a school of their parents' choosing. MOScholars, an education savings account, provides tax credits to private donors who make contributions to an Educational Assistance Organization, an approved nonprofit that awards scholarships to Missouri students.
But that initial proposal ballooned into a more than 160-page bill spanning several topics and policies, including raising the cap on tax credits under MOScholars from $50 million to $75 million.
Joplin Schools Superintendent Kerry Sachetta said, as a public school person, that proposed expansion raised a certain question: "If we we're going to expand education savings accounts, for school choice, what would that come to the expense of? Public school funding?"
The new law also established a literacy fund, increased small schools grants and created new provisions in a number of areas, including teacher certification and recovery high schools, which are designed for students who are recovering from substance use disorders.
For Sachetta, though parts of the expanded bill included pieces that were interesting and possibly advantageous, his concern was whether the bill could be funded or not.
The legislation, however, did receive some support. The Quality Schools Coalition, an education policy nonprofit, released a statement praising the bill a day after it passed.
In a statement posted to Facebook, the group said the bill marked "a significant step forward for Missouri's education system," citing the , teacher pay increase, school choice expansions, and additional funding for public schools,These measures, the group said, "will directly lead to better paid teachers and better prepared students."
Teacher retention in Missouri
The issue of teacher pay has been a concern not just in Missouri, but nationwide.
The national average for teacher salary was just above $68,000 in the 2022-2023 school year, according to the National Education Association's annual report.
In Missouri, the average teacher salary is $52,481, more than a $10,000 drop from the national average.
"Being able to attract teachers and keep them for more than four or five or six years has become more of a struggle lately," Sachetta said.
Barriers also existed before educators stepped into a classroom. Both Sachetta and Rossetti said they've seen a drop in the number of teacher candidates coming out of nearby schools, which is consistent with national data from the past few years.
The number of students graduating from traditional teacher education programs in the U.S. dipped by more than a third between 2008 and 2019, according to a 2022 American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education report.
"What we've seen, in the wake of the pandemic, is states and school districts targeting incentive moneys, targeting pay increases to those who teach shortage subjects and at shortage grade levels, especially in rural areas around the country where it's hard to get teachers of any sort," Toch said.
This has led many districts to alter their requirements for who can teach in the classroom.
"Probably 15 or 20 years ago, you might have had one, two, maybe three at the most, non-certified people teaching in your buildings," Rossetti said. "Now some schools have 30. Some schools have 15. Some schools have 20 because they're just not there."
What's next?
Sachetta said educators will keep their focus on what matters most — the students.
"The only way that we can help our kids be academically sound and do the best that they can do, is to have quality people in front of them in the classroom," he said.
Rossetti argues there's been a shift in how teachers are treated in society and that has made a "disheartening" effect on the field as a whole. This leaves many educators feeling like what they're doing is "just not good enough."
"You wonder why people aren't going into education because we're supposed to fix everything that's wrong with society and that's a big burden," he said. "You're sending one group of people up that hill to fight that battle, and I'm not sure that's fair."