Teachers in St. Louis will get a historic salary bump. Missouri still ranks among lowest states for teacher pay

ST. LOUIS — Teachers working at St. Louis Public Schools will receive a 17 percent bump in pay over the next three years — the largest raise they’ve seen in two decades.
For some educators, the raise is historic, but only starting a point.
For all of the 15 years Josie Johnston has been a teacher, she’s also worked as a senior pharmacy technician.
Along with teaching high school — world history and AP human geography — and coaching student speech and debate teams, she holds down a job at the pharmacy. She takes on the extra work not by choice, but by necessity.
On the days where she does both jobs, she wakes up around 5 a.m. to work a full school day. She takes about 45 minutes to go home and change clothes before heading to the pharmacy. Some nights she doesn’t get home until 8 p.m., which can be physically and emotionally draining, she said.
Superintendent Keisha Scarlett said the new raises will bring the average starting teacher salary in the district up to around $50,000 a year, higher than the state average, which sits at $34,052. Missouri ranks 50th in the nation for average beginning teacher pay, according to a 2023 report from the National Education Association.
“Missouri has struggled in keeping up with average salaries for educators, so here at Saint Louis Public Schools, we’ve always worked to stay well ahead of statewide averages and we’ve continued this commitment with this compensation plan here,” Scarlett said.
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The additional money from the pay raise is good, but teachers , like many other professions, are trying to keep up with inflation and the costs that come with having families, Johnstonshe said. This year, she had to take on an extra class.
At some point, there was a shift in this country in how teachers were treated, she said.
“Teachers stopped being respected, stopped being paid and not fairly compensated and given more and more and more and more to do,” she added.
Johnston is not alone. The nonpartisan Teacher Salary Project conducted a 2021 survey to show how much low salaries contributed to nationwide shortages of teachers. Eighty-two percent of classroom teachers said they either currently or previously worked multiple jobs to make ends meet. Of those, more than half were currently working multiple jobs. That includes 17 percent who held jobs during the school year that are unrelated to teaching, like moonlighting in restaurants.
“What we’re seeing across the country is not necessarily a shortage of qualified, caring, creative, passionate educators, we’re seeing a shortage of professionally compensated and respected education jobs,” said Kim Anderson, executive director of the National Education Association.
It’s a problem school districts across the country and in Missouri have sought to solve, with varying degrees of success.
For some districts, the answer has been a shortened school week in hopes that it would give educators a break. Others have opted to move funds around to pay teachers more. Some attempts have come at the state level. Legislators in Florida considered a bill that would raise teachers’ base salaries, but it failed to pass last month. At Minnesota’s St. Paul Public Schools, teachers negotiated $37.5 million in pay bumps.
For the last several years in Missouri, grants approved in the state budget have offered temporary state-matched funds for districts to raise salaries. Those are renewed on an annual basis. Lawmakers have sought a more permanent solution. For the last two years, a bipartisan effort has pushed legislation that would raise the minimum teacher salary to $38,000. This year’s version is advancing through the House.
In the meantime, educators have said they are tired and wondering how long they will last in the profession.
Josie Johnston teaches AP human geography and world history. Outside of her classroom duties she coaches both speech and debate teams. Photo by Gabrielle Hays/PBS NewsHour
When Scarlett asks teachers why they take on the extra work, some say they do it for pleasure, but many more say they’re trying to pay the bills.
“They have families, they have obligations,” the superintendent said. “They have dreams and hopes to own homes and different things like that.”
“I want our educators to choose to do extra work,” she added, “but I don’t want it to be out of necessity for them.”
The district, Scarlett said, can only do so much without state and federal legislators putting more money toward education. The new raises will come from the district’s general operating budget, she said.
“Our lawmakers in Jefferson City have been hesitant to make strong commitments to public education, and many districts across the state have struggled financially because of that,” she said. “This isn’t just in the locus of control of a school district and their surrounding community. There is a key role that legislators must take in order to really, fully fund education and ensure that educators are compensated in a way that is commensurate with their skills and with their contributions to our students’ lives.”
In St. Louis, the new increases will benefit SLPS teachers and staff represented by the American Federation of Teachers Local 420 union, which voted in favor of the contract in early March. The city’s school board approved and signed the deal days later.
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Educators will see a 7 percent increase to their paychecks when the new fiscal year begins July 1. Their pay will then go up another 5 percent for each of the next two years. Special education teachers will receive a slightly higher raise in the same time frame, while other employees represented by the union that ratified the deal will also benefit from the agreement.
Teacher shortages continue to be an issue for many states.
Federal data shows there is an especially critical need for special education teachers in the United States, which researchers note has been a longstanding challenge that worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Forty-five percent of schools reported vacancies in special education roles in the 2022-23 school year, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Education. Another 78 percent reported difficulty in hiring special education staff.
Beth Twedell has spent more than three decades in the classroom. She still remembers the reason she chose to become a special education teacher.
She was in high school when one of her childhood friends suffered a traumatic brain injury in a four-wheeler accident.
The St. Louis Board of Education approved a contract in March that gave teachers a 17 percent bump in their pay over the next three years. Photo by Gabrielle Hays/PBS NewsHour
“When it was time for him to leave his special school district building and try to come back into the junior high school for a couple of hours a day, my teachers had asked me if I would be interested in taking him to lunch and working with him for a little bit,” Twedell said.
At 16 years old, she decided to do this work for the rest of her life.
Nearly 30 years later, she’s worked her way up to department chair, but she has worked several second jobs over the years to pay the bills. Today, she works a retail job when she’s not teaching her special education class in the Fort Zumwalt School District.
Twedell said she has the second job to support her two kids, aged 15 and 21, and pay for expenses like car insurance and groceries. This school year, she’s done a 16-day stretch of working both jobs. At 52 years old, Twedell said the long work hours are hard on her body and keep her from spending more time with her kids.
“It’s overwhelming, and I can’t make ends meet by teaching and being department chair,” she said. “It doesn’t add up to enough to survive anymore.” she said.
Anderson of the NEA said the thought of teachers having to work multiple jobs to support their families is a national crisis.
The smattering of pay increases across the country offer some hope to teachers, but there must be long-term solutions to helping them, she said.
“Educators across this country believe that students of every color, every background, every zip code, every walk of life deserve highly qualified, caring, dedicated educators to escort them through their academic lives.”
This country needs the same value on educators, too, she said.