Mississippi House reopens door for teachers pay raise

• Mississippi House members revived a teacher pay raise bill after previous versions died in the legislature.
• The new proposal includes a $5,000 salary increase for public school teachers and additional raises for other school staff.
• House Speaker Jason White criticized the Senate for inaction on previous education bills.

Days after legislators in the House and Senate killed more than a dozen teacher pay raise bills, members of the House education committee reanimated the conversation.

Committee chair Rep. Rob Roberson, R-Starkville, proposed a bill on March 6 that would bump public school teacher salaries by $5,000 across the board, with an additional $3,000 supplement for special education teachers. The legislation also includes a $6,000 boost for occupational therapists and licensed school counselors, Roberson explained to the House.

The nearly 500-page education package would also reform the role of school attendance officers, said Speaker Jason White in a Friday news conference, focusing their role more on coaching than punishment. Attendance officers would receive a $5,600 pay increase.

Retired teachers would also be allowed to go back to work while still receiving their full benefits from the state Public Employees’ Retirement System. They would negotiate their salary with the district, White said, and would not be eligible to accrue more retirement benefits.

The state would earmark $18 million for the education department to allocate for failing districts, White explained after discussions in the House, based on demonstrated improvements.

“The issue is not always a lack of money, sometimes it’s a lack of pointed emphasis on teacher improvement, stability there and retaining teachers,” he said. “Maybe the answer is a supplement to help schools retain their best and brightest. Maybe it’s a way to recruit teachers to those areas.”

White’s vision for Mississippi schools: Why MS House Speaker says education reform will pass this session

Roberson, alongside his colleagues on the education committee, deleted all of the text in one of the last Senate education bills to come through the House and replaced it with the teacher pay raise and PERS provisions.

The bill also fixes mistakes in the PERS provisions, Roberson said, lowering the state employee retirement age from 62 to 60 and reducing the requirement back to 30 years of service. The service requirement for certified full-time first responders, White said, would be reduced to 25 years.

“If this all sounds familiar to you, it’s because y’all have voted on this at least twice and sent it to the Senate,” Roberson told the House Friday morning. “Unfortunately, this place has a tendency to create issues for us in terms of getting good work done. I’m not putting the blame on the Senate, not putting the blame on the House, but it’s about time we got the good work done.”

Roberson said he didn’t blame the Senate, but White was more than happy to criticize the other chamber. He boasted that the House was in session working Friday morning while the Senate took a long weekend, sending its members home on Thursday afternoon.

As White touted the strength of the House and its latest piece of legislation, he took shots at Senate leaders, including education committee chair Sen. Dennis DeBar, R-Leakesville, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. He said that Hosemann wasn’t aligned with Mississippi’s Republican Party, telling attendees at his news conference that Hosemann sent “love letters” to people like Nancy Loome, one of the most outspoken advocates against school choice who has also campaigned against Republicans in local elections.

The death of school choice: MS Senate committee kills House school choice package in just 90 seconds

White derided members of the Senate for killing the House’s initial teacher pay raise bill, but the House did also kill a teacher pay raise bill that originated in the Senate and proposed a $2,000 increase for teachers, assistant teachers and college professors. When asked why the House had chosen to kill the bill instead of passing it through or amending it, White said the raise just wasn’t enough.

“This is not a hollow promise, and it’s not a political play,” White said. “The Senate education committee once again killed an education bill without so much as any deliberation. Your House is here. We beg our Senate colleagues to engage.”

Some Democrats in the House, wary of legislation coming out of the education committee after White’s universal school choice bill, questioned Roberson’s intentions with the bill and whether it included any of the contentious language that the chamber has argued over since the start of the session.

“I can’t think of one thing in this bill that you and I would not agree on,” Roberson told Rep. Kabir Karriem, D-Columbus. When all of the questions had been answered, Roberson closed his presentation simply. “Vote for this,” he urged his colleagues.

They obliged, voting unanimously in favor of the bill and opening the door one final time for a teacher pay raise this session.