Arkansas Advocate: Teacher salary funding concerns remain for rural school districts

By ANTOINETTE GRAJEDA | Arkansas Advocate

As more Arkansas schools cautiously expand their salary schedules, rural district administrators remain concerned about how the state will continue providing funding for mandated teacher raises in the years ahead.

Changes in state law last year increased the minimum annual teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000 and eliminated a state salary schedule that included mandatory step-pay hikes for additional experience and education. That left individual districts to set up their own salary schedules.  

According to the Advocate’s analysis of district salary schedules, 29 of the state’s 234 traditional public school districts offer a maximum salary of $50,000 for the 2024-2025 academic year, down from 71 last year. Some of those districts offer $50,000 or placement on their 2022-2023 salary schedule, whichever is greater. 

State officials have said eliminating a mandatory salary schedule provides more flexibility to districts to develop personalized pay scales, which could offer more than the $50,000 minimum. Five districts offer starting salaries of $51,000 or higher, an increase from three during the 2023-2024 academic year. 

Arkansas Rural Education Association Director Dennis Copeland said superintendents would like to provide pay increases for more experience, but they’re concerned about the long-term sustainability of implementing the LEARNS Act, a 2023 law that made several changes to the state’s education system, including increasing teachers’ minimum pay and establishing a school voucher program.

“I think they’re real reluctant to do that, especially the smaller schools, because of that fear of the money not being there and them having to come up with it,” Copeland said. 

Districts are required to create salary schedules to qualify for state funds that help cover the cost of increasing minimum salaries to $50,000 and providing at least a $2,000 raise to all teachers, as mandated by the LEARNS Act.

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has promised to continue providing the additional teacher compensation funding, but there are concerns about how state-funded programs will be affected by a series of tax cuts, the most recent of which lowered the top corporate income tax rate and the top individual income tax rate.

“The thing that worries me is tax cuts,” Copeland said. “Things that go into the general fund are going to be less, so where is the money going to come from? Now they say they’ve got it covered and I’m sure they do, but it’s one of those deals where how certain are you and what happens if it doesn’t come to be like you said it would be?” 

For the first two years of LEARNS Act implementation, state officials budgeted $181.5 million — $173.2 million for traditional public schools and $8.3 million for public charter schools — in general revenue funding for both fiscal years to cover the costs of increasing minimum teacher salaries and providing a $2,000 bonus, ADE spokesperson Kimberly Mundell said. The funding covers teacher salaries and benefits.

Funding was calculated on each school district’s 2022-2023 budgeted base salaries, according to an ADE memo. Officials won’t recalculate the amount because all salaries now have to be at least $50,000 and they will no longer have the same starting point to see how short districts might have been, Mundell said. 

Lawmakers approve the state’s budget every two years during the fiscal session. The Arkansas Legislature will determine if the funding for additional teacher compensation will continue to come from general revenue or other sources, Mundell said. 

“Governor Sanders raised Arkansas teachers’ starting salaries from $36,000 to $50,000 because she believes that great education starts with great educators,” Mundell said. “She also stated that the funding would continue in perpetuity. The Department of Education is committed to working with the legislature to continue funding these salary increases.”

The Mayflower School District received $630,254 in additional teacher compensation funds, but superintendent Andy Chisum said it left his central Arkansas district $30,000 to $40,000 short during the 2023-2024 academic year because the state only funded positions that were entirely paid for with state funds.  

Smaller, rural districts have long faced challenges with the state’s per-student funding model because it’s based on enrollment. As rural populations decline, so too do enrollment and per-pupil funding. Mayflower’s current student enrollment is about 955, down from about 1,120 a decade ago, according to ADE data.

Some districts use federal funding to cover the cost of teacher salaries. If an employee was partially paid with federal funds, the additional teacher compensation from the state was prorated based on the amount of the salary that was paid for with state funds, Mundell said.

The LEARNS Act requires that funds allocated by the General Assembly for additional teacher compensation only be used for salaries. To qualify, districts must use state funding equal to 80% or more of the amount allocated for personnel salaries, according to the state’s funding matrix. Districts can apply for a waiver from this requirement if it would put them into fiscal distress. No districts applied for a waiver, Mundell said. 

Meeting the new financial obligations of a $50,000 minimum salary as well as other state requirements, such as offering certain courses or maintaining the proper student-teacher ratio, is a balancing act that Armorel School District Superintendent Tiffany Morgan said forces districts to be creative. 

Morgan said it’s been “somewhat of a financial strain” to meet all the requirements, but her northeast Arkansas district is trying to mesh everything together. In an effort to be efficient with funding, Armorel —  which Morgan said has had an enrollment of around 400 since she was a teacher in the ‘90s — is often searching for dual-certified educators. Because the district is small, teachers often don’t have a full load in a single subject area, so Morgan said they look for teachers who can teach multiple subjects. 

“That’s not ideal,” she said. “That is a very hard person to find.”

Chisum said districts are also struggling with inflation. 

“Everything is going up,” he said. “Construction costs are astronomical right now. The cost of food to stock your cafeterias, anytime an air conditioning unit goes out, textbooks, anything that you’re dealing with, the cost has gone up and the percentage has gone up higher than what our funding has gone up.”

Pay structures

In the post-LEARNS landscape, salary schedules vary across the state as districts adapt to what they think they can sustain. In 85 districts, teachers with a bachelor’s degree earn $50,000 no matter how much experience they have, the Advocate’s analysis found. Meanwhile, 68 districts offer teachers with a master’s degree a starting salary of $51,000 or more. 

Strong-Huttig School District Superintendent Amy Sanchez said they’ve had to keep their salary schedule pretty flat because “we’re not able to give other raises at this time.” The south Arkansas district, which has around 284 students this year, received $164,808 in additional teacher compensation funding from the state, the least of any traditional public school district. Central Arkansas’ Pulaski County Special School District received $4.74 million, the most of any district.

Strong-Huttig’s salary schedule tops out at $52,650; Sanchez said she would like to offer more money if possible. Sanchez said she thinks the state’s merit pay program will help with that because “it will inspire teachers to work toward that caliber of instruction.”

About $10 million in bonuses were distributed to nearly 3,000 teachers this summer through the new Merit Teacher Incentive Fund Program, which was created through the LEARNS Act. Awarded teachers include those who “demonstrated outstanding growth in student performance, served as a mentor to aspiring teachers who participated in yearlong residencies, and/or taught in a subject, geographical, or designation area experiencing a critical teacher shortage,” according to the governor’s office.

While discussing the new merit program at the legislative Joint Education Committee’s Aug. 20 meeting, Sen. Linda Chesterfield, D-Little Rock, questioned Education Secretary Jacob Oliva about his overall plan for teacher retention beyond the bonuses. Chesterfield noted the merit pay didn’t impact “the vast majority of individuals in the profession” and said a number of districts’ salary schedules remain at $50,000 for several years.

Nearly two-thirds of traditional public school districts made no changes to their salary schedules for the 2024-2025 academic year, according the Advocate’s analysis.

“If we are anticipating individuals working for the next five years at the same rate of pay, what are we putting in place for retention because most folks are not going to work for the same thing for five years in a row with no increase in salary,” she said. 

Oliva said the challenge with salary schedules is they sometimes mean “unsatisfactory teachers that are hurting students get an automatic raise, and we don’t want that.” 

Oliva said compressed salary schedules are not due to “a lack of desire for school districts to want to pay teachers more,” and he plans to work with lawmakers ahead of the 2025 legislative session to discuss funding options. 

“As we go forward, I think the conversation is let’s get some more accurate, real-time information and data, and if we are finding districts that are stagnant, we can follow up with those districts and help look at some innovative strategies so that they can develop a salary schedule that works best for them,” he said. 

Mayflower’s salary schedule maxes out at $58,500, but Chisum said he’s interested in deviating from a traditional salary schedule with set increases. Chisum said he wants to explore offering a base pay and then add stipends for experience and education.

“Teachers would still get the benefit of the additional education and the years of experience, but it’d be in the form of a stipend, so if for some reason the funding model changed, it would be a lot easier and simpler to roll that back if the time came for that,” he said. 

Armorel has implemented a model where the district offers a $50,000 base pay for all teachers, but educators with a master’s degree earn a $2,000 stipend and are eligible for a $500 annual increase for years 15-21.

While critics of the LEARNS Act have decried its removal of required pay increases for teachers with more experience, Morgan said she’s okay with it. The Armorel superintendent said she thinks the pay scale her district developed is similar to what’s seen in other industries where years of experience don’t always result in a pay bump, but more certifications and education often do. 

“I think it’s just we’ve been so accustomed to it the other way where there were steps that I really do think that it mirrors what the rest of the world does,” Morgan said.