Another sign that South Dakota’s budgetary dysfunction is the increasing gap between the target teacher salary that the great 2016 sales increase was supposed to fund and the actual barrel-bottom salaries that South Dakota’s teachers are receiving.
According to data presented by the Department of Education yesterday to the Teacher Compensation Review Board, while schools were making progress toward reaching the statutory target teacher salary in the first three years of the tax increase, actual salary increases have fallen behind target increases since Governor Kristi Noem took office:
The gap between target and actual was 3.14% in Academic Year 2017. Actual closed to within 1.87% of target in AY2019, the last year of budgeting by the Dennis Daugaard administration. The gap has increased every year, to 7.89% in AY 2023.
When I ran the numbers in 2018 on the effectiveness of Governor Daugaard’s sales-tax-for-teacher-pay plan, South Dakota remained last in the region in actual teacher pay and in teacher purchasing power, behind every neighboring state by thousands of dollars. Five years later, South Dakota teachers are still making thousands less, in real dollars and in purchasing power, in South Dakota than they would for the same work in any neighboring state:
But hey, says the new chair of the Teacher Compensation Review Board, Senator Jim Bolin (R-16/Canton), look on the bright side:
Bolin compared South Dakota’s teacher-pay situation to a two-mile race at a track meet. South Dakota still isn’t winning, he said, “But we are not being lapped by other runners” [Bob Mercer, “South Dakota Teachers Made More Than Two Other States,” KELO-TV, 2023.07.17].
Maybe I shouldn’t work a Bolin metaphor too hard, but if teacher pay is a two-mile race, a lap is an eighth of the full distance. South Dakota is about $10,000 behind the rough-average $66,000 in purchasing power that teachers earn in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wyoming are getting. $10,000 is more than an eighth of $66,000. Iowa, Minnesota, and Wyoming appear to have lapped us.
Turning back to our own lowly in-state standard, the AY 2023 gap between South Dakota’s target teacher pay and actual average teacher pay is $4,402. The DOE says we came into AY2023 with 9,905 teachers. Multiply gap by teachers, and you can see that closing the target/actual gap would have cost $43.6 million. South Dakota ended Fiscal Year 2023 with a budget surplus of $96.8 million, more than twice the amount necessary to meet the target teacher salary.
We have the money to meet the target teacher salary and fulfill the stated purpose of the 2016 teacher pay reforms. We just don’t have the will.
Bolin is no Simeon Birnbaum, is he? Birnbaum wouldn’t let himself get even close to being lapped in the two mile.
It’s great that the Legislature tried to raise teacher salaries, but as I said at the time, it takes a concerted effort over a period of time to get to the point of being competitive. Once you fall behind by half a lap, the race is lost. You might keep running for pride and a participation trophy, though, and the fact that you can’t get better if you stop trying.
Senator Jim Bolin of Canton was quoted extensively about all the efforts made to support teacher pay. With all due respect, my good friend Senator Jim: you get an F rating once again.
Why is Minnesota going backwards?
People talk so much about this topic, but the constitution does not direct the “State Government” to pay teachers, it simply directs the state government to ensure that there is a uniformed public education system that works through out the entire State. For the most part, we have a pretty good K-12 Education system that is pretty self governed by the Districts. The property tax dollars are collected by the counties, of which act to distribute the funds to their proper channels, of which 65% of the property tax goes to the public school system. The problem is NOT at the statewide level, but the districts themselves, the Sioux Falls School District has a district-wide revenue stream of nearly $300,000,000, the teachers get something like 48% of the revenues..I had this all broken down in an article I wrote 6 months ago at http://www.siouxfallscommunitychronicle.com under the “State Affairs” link.
Grudznick–Have you visited Minnesota lately…if that is backward, put me in reverse. Young people just out of college are getting entry level professional and management jobs paying in the $75,000 a year range…and the hiring is increasing, not decreasing.
Good one, Mr. Pay – SoDak teacher’s pay is a “participation trophy” occupation.
These numbers must be averaged. I’ve been teaching for 8 years with a BA. I don’t even make $54k. Yeesh.
Mike Z. is partly correct. The Constitution does not mandate teacher pay. Districts are generally in charge of negotiating staffing matters, including the pay schedule. However, state statute uses the state aid formula to try to increase teacher pay, while also using it to provide property tax relief. Of course all this depends on how much money is dumped into the formula by the Legislature and by local property taxpayers. School finances are very complex. There are various separate funds and multiple ways to fund district needs. Largely, though, the state controls the maximum amount districts can increase overall outlays in general funds, and there are limits on other funding as well.
The state Department of Education website has some links that help explain how the system works.This one is for the general fund:
https://doe.sd.gov/ofm/documents/GSA-IssueBrief-FY24.pdf
And this provides links to the entire funding system:
https://doe.sd.gov/ofm/schoolbudget.aspx
Mr. Bolin, he having one of the better coifs in the legislatures, for a very long time, second only to Mr. Novstrup, the elder, does have a lot of insight in these matters. The man was, after all, an actual teacher in South Dakota. He has not, to grudznick’s knowledge, ever been ousted. I suspect he wracked some fear in the minds of the fatcat administrators in his districts, and he has a sound grasp of conservatism.
I say we should listen to Mr. Bolin more.
If Bolin were any good at teaching, and he felt it was a meaningful and rewarding profession (as it should be) he would still be focused on that profession. He has supplemented his employment with the holding of various local and state government offices since 2007.
I started to misread the Headline—SD Teacher Pay Falling….
….Getting Laptopped by Neighboring States. Aha!
The Answer would be in the Title! Misread of course.
We could ask the Legislature to jack in another 5 cents sales tax? Hey we are rugged Rock ribbed dimwits, we never want to have a state income tax and we never want a Communist Democrat President telling what to do, but sure let’s turn the teachers half Penny, now teachers 3/10ths of a penny tax to the teachers 5.3 cents tax, sure why not?
It’s not in manipulating the sales tax system, because the school board can always use the money to pay more administrators, janitors, athletic coaches…..and teachers pay stays 51st in the nation.
The answer? Laptops.since we know the Administrators always Want teachers pay here to be 51st or 50th in the nation, let the teachers drop out of their not very effective union, and start a new union, the Teachers Laptop Union. Meaning any teacher with the new Union could bargain for higher wages (would the District hire scab teachers?) and the Contract could state that teachers could teach on site or online! Kids would still facebooking and twittering and snap chatting during class , what’s the difference?
The cyber teacher in the new union could teach onsite or from their nice new digs in Montana, US Virgin Islands, Hong Kong, Paris, you see how the teachers could be better teachers for the kids if they are Laptopping out of state out of country, the kids would graduate with cyber skills and not white bread white rule skills!
A fresh difference.
The Republican Socialist state of Wyoming pays their teachers better than SD! Maybe their School Boards drink Minnesota bottled water?
Does the correlation strike anyone else as understandable?
1. Lowest national teachers’ pay and a Secretary of State’s team that can’t understand how to do their job.
2. A state with a large, maybe the largest, “Best and Brightest” flight to other states.
3. A stagnant economy which begs and bribes big, valid companies to move to SD and receives a continual response of “Meh!”
Q ~ What remains when the best and brightest have moved away for seventy-five years or more?
A ~ Under achieving people marrying other under achieving people and raising under achieving children.
In short, “A depleted gene pool of ignorance.”
‘Cause slavery had its good parts. Coming soon to your South Dakota teenagers curriculum,
– U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris criticized Florida “extremists” on Friday for backing educational guidelines that taught “revisionist history” about slavery in the United States. “instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
“Adults know what slavery really involved. It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worst examples of … depriving people of humanity in our world,” she said.
*… above post from Reuters 7/21/23