North Carolina House lawmakers have passed a budget bill that would raise beginning teacher pay by about 22% by fall 2026. The makes several moves to raise teacher pay that are absent in the .
During the House's final debate of its budget bill Wednesday night, Representative Dean Arp (R-Union) called his chamber's proposal a "credible, Carolina-strong conservative budget."
"It maintains the ability to meet today's challenges and tomorrow's future without mortgaging our children and grandchildren's future," Arp said, adding it also helps make North Carolina number one in starting teacher pay in the Southeast and gives all teachers a raise.
The House would help pay for its proposals by eliminating vacant positions across many state agencies, and also by putting a pause on scheduled income tax cuts that the Senate is set to continue. The two chambers will have to reconcile their differences in their coming budget negotiations.
Starting teacher pay
Representative Erin Paré (R-Wake) called the House's proposal for teacher pay "significant and historic" when she introduced the chamber's proposal at a press conference earlier this week.
"These raises are a major step forward in making North Carolina a destination state for recruiting and retaining the very best educators," Paré said.
While House lawmakers propose raising starting pay for public school teachers by $9,000 by 2026, the Senate is proposing a modest $510 increase over the same time frame.
House lawmakers want to raise the state base pay for beginning teachers from the current rate of $41,000 to $48,000 this coming fall, then to $50,000 the next year. That's compared to the Senate's proposed starting pay of $41,510 in both years of the biennial budget.
Those figures refer to the state-funded base pay for teachers' salaries, not including county funding and other state-funded supplements for teacher pay that can amount to thousands of dollars on top of base pay.
A North Carolina teacher on the current pay scale would have to teach for 11 years before they would earn what the House is proposing as a starting salary.
Although several Democrats voiced support for the raises during the House's debate Wednesday, some raised concerns about how they would be paid for.
"We cannot sustain a responsible budget that gives salary increases to teachers and state employees, not with new revenue, but on the back of eliminating vacant state employee positions," said Rep. Marcia Morey (D-Durham).
Morey is a former district court judge and a member of the House's Justice and Public Safety Appropriations Committee. She said state agencies, including the Department of Corrections, have been using funding from vacant positions to pay for other underfunded needs and will struggle if state funding for those positions is eliminated.
Step increases for veteran teachers
The House is further proposing to reinstate small annual raises for every additional year of experience a teacher has – commonly called "step increases" – while the Senate would continue to hold veteran teachers' pay steady for a decade once they hit 15 years of experience. In recent years, the only raises these veteran teachers receive are from broad increases in the state budget.
The North Carolina General Assembly took a first stab at ending annual step increases in 2014, when it simplified the salary schedule to six steps. Then in subsequent years, lawmakers brought back step increases for teachers in the first 15 years of their career, but eliminated the steps in later years.
Master's pay
The House also wants to bring back a 10% pay supplement for all certified teachers with master's degrees and other advanced degrees. The legislature ended that supplement in 2013.
Currently, only teachers who started their degree programs before 2013 are eligible for the statewide supplement. A few school districts, including Wake County Schools and Durham Public Schools, have recently started to offer a master's degree supplement paid for with local funds.
NCAE reacts, calling for more support for veteran teachers
Tamika Walker Kelly, president of the North Carolina Association of Educators, said the association appreciates House lawmakers' efforts, but that veteran teachers still deserve more.
"On top of doing step increases, educators in North Carolina still need to see significant impacts to their paycheck for the work that they are doing with students every single day," Walker Kelly said.
North Carolina ranked 43rd in the nation for average teacher pay this year, and 39th in beginning teacher pay, in an by the National Education Association.
"We continue to see in both the Senate and the House budget an emphasis on new teachers, but we want to make sure that we continue to value our veteran educators," Walker Kelly said. "One of the reasons why is that the data continues to show that experienced teachers increase student performance."
Now that the House has passed its budget, the two chambers will negotiate a final budget bill to send to Governor Josh Stein for consideration. Stein's symbolic budget request called for raising beginning teacher salaries to the highest in the Southeast.
"The House budget is about on par with that, but the overall salary increase [in Stein's recommendation] was about 10%," Walker Kelly said. "The House Budget is getting there. It's closer to that mark, but not quite there."
