Don't forget veteran teachers

Published February 12, 2014

Editorial by Winston-Salem Journal, February 12, 2014.

Gov. Pat McCrory and his legislative allies say they’ve found $200 million to raise teacher salaries. But if they hope to stem teacher attrition and maintain an experienced teaching faculty, they must find more.

On Monday, McCrory announced the initiative to raise starting teacher salaries to $33,000 a year in 2014-15 and $35,000 in 2015-16. As we said here Tuesday, it’s a good first step, but much more is needed, including for veteran teachers.

While the governor and legislative leaders said they’d also raise salaries for more experi-enced teachers, they didn’t provide details during the press conference at McCrory’s alma mater, Ragsdale High School in Jamestown.

There’s no dismissing the significance of this raise for the state’s newest teachers. Since 2009, the legislature has provided only one 1.2 percent teacher salary increase and that stagnation has compressed the salary range for teachers who have entered the profession since that year. Teachers with five years of experience are making only a few dollars more than those who started in August.

This proposal won’t eliminate that bottle jam -- in fact, it will make it worse -- but at least it provides a significant raise to those stuck at the bottom of the pay scale. And it will of-fer an incentive for new graduates to take teaching jobs this coming summer.

New recruits might be needed because initial indications are that the majority of the state’s teachers, those with more than about seven years of experience, get nothing under this plan. And it is those teachers, recent news reports indicate, who have been deserting the profession or taking teaching jobs elsewhere.

While precise numbers are not available, estimates of the number of teachers who do not receive a pay raise under this initiative have run as high as 65,000. That means that for all the governor’s wonderful words regarding veteran teachers who have done so much for North Carolina, he didn’t offer them anything Monday.

McCrory said this initiative is just the first of many to improve the profession of teaching. He has until the spring legislative session to demonstrate that he means that.