Bill would set Maine teacher salaries at minimum of $40,000

[TexasTowelie]

A bill to raise the minimum teacher salary in Maine to $40,000 a year was before lawmakers on Wednesday, more than a decade after lawmakers set the last minimum salary at $30,000 a year.

“If we want to show that we value and respect education, we must provide teachers with respectable wages,” Nate Petersen, a social studies teacher at Hermon High School, said at Wednesday’s public hearing. “We need standards that ensure anyone who becomes a teacher enters the classroom ready to reach, teach and inspire every student. You can’t attain those qualities when you’re only offering to pay someone a minimum of $30,000.”

The bill’s author, Sen. Rebecca Millett, D-Cape Elizabeth, had a similar bill last session, which failed in a party-line vote in the Senate. L.D. 818 would also raise teacher training standards and increase the amount of state student loan aid available to students training to be teachers.

Legislation passed in 2005 during the Baldacci administration set a minimum teacher salary of $30,000 a year. Under that law, the state sent money to districts to make up the difference between what the districts paid some teachers and the $30,000 minimum. The state funding stopped in 2012-13, when the supplement was eliminated in a cost-cutting move under the LePage administration, leaving districts to make up the difference.

Read more: http://www.pressherald.com/2017/05/03/bill-would-set-maine-teacher-salaries-at-minimum-of-40000/

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. It is my understanding that in some other countries,

teachers are honored and paid well. If I recall correctly, Hungary is one such. I believe I've read that streets are sometimes named after teachers.

What I do know from my own work experience -- and I've never been a teacher -- is that if employees are valued and treated well they will tend to stick around and do good work. In any job where the public is dealt with in some way, say in retail or restaurants or (dare I suggest this?) teaching, the employees being treated well will result in those same employees working hard and for the most part doing good work.

Let's just reflect for a moment on restaurant employees. I bet everyone reading this likes to eat out, at least occasionally. Now, if you only go out every other month or so, you will never notice this, but if you eat out regularly at the same restaurants, you will absolutely notice over time if you ever see the same servers at more than one visit. Too often you never see the same server more than once. Maybe twice. I do notice specific restaurants in my city where I actually see the same server more than once or twice, and it makes me feel much better about that restaurant.

And while teaching isn't a whole lot like restaurant work, the underlying thing of being treated well enough to stick around is the same. Over the years (and I'm now 68) I have often been somewhat amazed at how many people I know who got a teaching degree and either never taught at all, or only taught for a few years and then left the profession. How sad and revealing is that?