We should pay teachers what they’re worth, and keep them right here in Kentucky

Last summer the News Journal had a delightful young woman, Leeann Fragosa, who interned for us.

Mark White is Editor of The News Journal.

While she isn’t a journalism major, Leeann is still a good writer. She is funny and one of those people, who just kind of lifts the mood of the room when she is in it. She is personable and smart.

Leeann is an education major and plans to become an elementary school teacher, which in many ways is a good thing. Society needs smart, bright young people going into education and teaching the next generations.

From a personal standpoint though, a part of me always winces when I hear that an intelligent, bright young person, who I like, such as Leeann, is going into education.

As the son of a retired educator, I know that Leeann, and other young teachers like her, are probably going to struggle financially through much of their adult lives because we just don’t pay our teachers enough.

I’ll offer my dad as an example of what I am talking about.

In addition to his day job as a high school social studies teacher, my dad always worked one and sometimes two other jobs just to make ends meet when I was growing up. After the school day ended, on weekends and during the summer, he worked part-time at Belks for several years and then Lowes Sporting Goods for several more years after that.

In addition, he also started the baseball team in the 1970s at Lynn Camp High School, then the academic team in the 1980s, and the golf team in the 1990s.

Despite all these jobs, my dad still made so little money that I qualified for a reduced price lunch when I was in fourth grade.

My dad was like many teachers, who had some kind of side job going to help make ends meet. My freshmen year of high school our house needed a new roof, and the assistant principal and the physical education teacher at my school were the ones, who built it.

People with a college degree and then master’s degree on top of that, shouldn’t have to work two and three jobs just to make ends meet.

As a society, we should be paying our teachers better for numerous reasons, but in Kentucky though, there is another more specific reason that we need to raise teacher pay, which is that we are losing some of our brightest young teachers to our surrounding states, which are paying significantly more.

The Kentucky Association of School Administrators (KASA) recently released a statement, which was signed by 93 superintendents across the state, including Whitley County Superintendent John Siler.

The statement is in response to a state budget proposal, and encourages more state funding in order to raise the starting pay for teachers.

“There is a significant gap in teachers’ beginning pay, and that is becoming apparent from state-to-state,” said Siler. “If Kentucky wants to be competitive in attracting young, new teachers to the state, then legislators and other people in Frankfort, including the governor, need to get on the same page.”

Leaders in surrounding states, such as Tennessee, Ohio and Indiana, are establishing minimum starting teacher salaries around $50,000, while Kentucky’s average starting teacher salary is $38,010. In one district in Kentucky, a beginning teacher makes only $34,000. After taxes and mandatory pension contributions are deducted, this drops the take home salary to less than $25,000 per year, according to a KASA release.

Particularly in southeastern Kentucky, we need the best teachers we can get. We live in an impoverished area economically speaking, and by and large students from impoverished areas, typically have some of the lowest test scores.

When you have great teachers though, this doesn’t have to be the case.

Whitley East Elementary School, which has 87.6 percent of students who are classified as economically disadvantaged, is a great example of this. For the 2022-2023 school year, students scored so well that Whitley East had the eighth highest test scores in the state among all elementary schools.

To get results like this, you need the best teachers that you can get, which isn’t going to happen when they can drive another 20 minutes down the road to Tennessee and make another $10,000 or more per year.

I would encourage 82^nd Rep. Nick Wilson, who represents Whitley County in the Kentucky House of Representatives, and Senate President Robert Stivers, who represents Whitley County in the Kentucky Senate, to seriously take a look at raising teacher pay before we lose some of our best and brightest young teachers to other states.