Gov. Henry McMaster wants to give SC teachers a $3,000 raise next year
Gov. Henry McMaster plans to ask the state’s powerful budget writers next year to spend $211 million to add $3,000 to the annual pay of South Carolina’s more than 50,000 public school teachers.
McMaster announced his proposal Tuesday at the Lexington Two Innovation Center, alongside lawmakers, including House Speaker Jay Lucas, R-Darlington. The announcement previews one part of the governor’s executive budget, a spending wish list, which will include his priorities in the state’s $10.2 billion spending plan.
The governor’s office said the hike will raise the new state salary for teachers to $38,000, up from $32,000 last school year. It also would put the state’s average teacher salary $2,456 above the southeastern average, bring the state’s average teacher salary into the top 25 in the country.
This year, the state was ranked 41st, the governor said.
McMaster said Tuesday state leaders chose a flat amount, rather than a percentage, because it would have a “greater impact inside the classrooms, and also in the (company) board rooms around the country.”
“When business leaders are looking for the best place to go … what they’re looking for is what’s going on in the classrooms,” McMaster said. “We have acknowledged before we have some weak links. It’s not good to have weak links in your education system. But to have weak links, acknowledge it and not do something about it is what is bad.”
State leaders said Tuesday the flat raise will help recruit and keep newer, less experienced teachers who are leaving the classroom or choosing another profession altogether — teachers like Lauren Rawls, a second year kindergarten teacher at Cayce Elementary.
Rawls told reporters Tuesday that her low salary wouldn’t allow her to both get a master’s degree and buy a house.
She ultimately decided to buy a house.
“In doing that, I thought I might be sacrificing my chance to go back and get my master’s degree because I can’t afford to do both,” she said.
Support for proposal
But will lawmakers support the proposal next year? The answer is likely yes.
House budget chief Murrell Smith, whose committee gets the first crack at the state’s spending plan each year, said he is “absolutely supportive” of the governor’s proposal. The Sumter Republican could not make the press conference due to a scheduling conflict.
In a statement, Senate Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman, who controls the state budget process in the Senate, didn’t endorse the idea or slam the proposal, saying it’s “exciting” to have a governor supporting public education.
“While I don’t typically endorse specific funding proposals ahead of the (Senate) Finance Committee’s work, it is clear that K-12 will again be a large part of this year’s budget focus,” said Leatherman, a Florence Republican who also was unable to make the press conference, also citing a scheduling conflict. “I look forward to working with my colleagues on this and many other issues facing our state.”
Tuesday was not the first time McMaster has said he wants to give teachers a $3,000 raise.
McMaster told reporters last month, “I think we ought to raise them $3,000, or as much as we can, but we have to stay competitive.”
“The teachers have a very important function, and if we don’t stay ahead of the competition there, we will not have the best teachers in the country and that’s what we want,” he said. “We raised them last year, we need to raise them again across the board.”
South Carolina had more than 600 vacant teaching positions at the end of last year, and nearly half of the 7,300 teachers who left the classroom in 2017 taught for five or fewer years, McMaster said Tuesday, citing data from the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention and Advancement at Winthrop University.
“I believe we’ll start hearing young people say ‘I want to be a teacher’ and parents won’t try to talk them out of it,” said the state’s schools Superintendent Molly Spearman. “People won’t say you could make more money doing something else.”
Though state leaders wrapped their arms around the idea, the state’s teachers associations watched cautiously.
“It sounds like a good step in the right direction,” said Sherry East, president of the South Carolina Education Association.
“The missing part is how about the non-certified folks,” East continued. “The state doesn’t fund them. Each district has to fund those workers’ pay raises and a lot districts can afford it, but most of them cannot. I’m happy for teachers, but I want to make sure we take care of all school personnel.”
While she called the raise a step in the right direction, SC for ED founder Lisa Ellis told The State McMaster’s proposal does not address her group’s request to increase the number of years of experience for which a teacher must receive a mandatory pay raise from year to year. Right now, mandatory annual teacher pay raises are required for teachers with up to 23 years experience in the classroom. Ellis would like to see that pay raise requirement extended to 28 years experience.
“Last year the Legislature did a significant job in helping starting teachers,” said Ellis, whose group led a 10,000 person march in May across the State House grounds to protest low pay and bad working conditions for teachers. “But we really need to retain our veteran teachers and increasing those salary steps for the top of the schedule would go a long way in doing that.”
This story was originally published December 10, 2019 at 2:17 PM.
