A bill filed by Evansville Rep. Ryan Hatfield (D-Evansville) on Wednesday would set a minimum salary of $50,000 for any “full-time teacher employed by a school corporation.”
That would represent a huge bump for several local educators. The minimum teacher salary inside the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corp. currently stands at $38,000, while the average hovers around $50,000. Salaries in some rural or poorer communities around the state are even lower.
Those figures are subterranean compared to the money raked in by the EVSC’s army of administrators, and downright paltry next to Superintendent David Smith’s yearly compensation of $256,974. A beginning teacher would have to work seven years to make that much.
If passed, Hatfield’s bill would help some Evansville educators quit second jobs and finally earn the cash they deserve. At the very least, they could afford to fill their classrooms with the supplies they depressingly have to pay for themselves.
But here’s the thing: the bill’s fate depends on the whims of the Indiana legislature, whose treatment of teachers in recent years has ranged from condescending to downright hostile.
Even when thousands of teachers swarmed the statehouse in November to push for higher pay and better school funding, Gov. Eric Holcomb initially balked at addressing their demands. He said any major monetary moves should wait until next year, when legislators tackle another biennium budget.
According to WTHR, he’s waffled on that in the last few days. He hinted that he might support bolstering teacher pay in some way. As long as, you know, Amazon executives don’t need a tax break or something.
In fairness, though, Hatfield’s bill is gonna cost money. A lot of it.
According to the bill’s fiscal analysis, upping minimum salaries to $50,000 would increase school corporations’ spending by at least $243 million statewide in 2021 alone.
That wouldn’t ebb anytime soon, either. And in a state packed with cash-strapped schools, that could cause a huge problem. Sure, Indiana could shoulder some of that cost, but Hatfield’s bill doesn’t call for any increase in state support, the fiscal analysis states.
The real issue is that we let ourselves get to this point.
It’s ludicrous that I even have to say this, but teachers shouldn’t have to work second jobs to pay their bills. And they definitely shouldn’t have to go on food stamps, which Smith claimed some EVSC educators have already done.
This bill has pretty much no chance of passing. But Indiana lawmakers can't ignore the state's public education woes forever (or hey, maybe they can. It's worked for them so far).
They need to do something to improve teacher pay, and they need to do it now. Scant funding increases partially eaten up by charter schools aren’t going to fix the problem.
In July, when Holcomb ambled into the Pie Pan in Evansville to interrupt everyone’s afternoon, a crowd of teachers and education backers waited for him. They discussed school funding for several minutes, but mostly talked around each other.
When he walked away, Vanderburgh County Democratic Party chairwoman Edie Hardcastle sighed.
“His response is that (funding) is a process,” she said. “But this process has been going on for 15-plus years.”
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