Gov. Tate Reeves will soon get a chance to sign another teacher pay raise into law, albeit a smaller one than the state’s largest on record in 2022.
Lawmakers in the House and Senate voted unanimously on Wednesday to send a teacher pay package to the governor’s desk that would give K-12 educators in the state’s public-school system a $2,000 annual raise. Teachers, special education teachers, assistant teachers, speech therapists, and school psychologists are all included. Special education teachers, speech therapists, and school psychologists will also receive an annual stipend of $2,000, making for a total raise of $4,000.
The move comes after months of back and forth that started with the Senate proposing an immediate $2,000 pay bump and the House offering an immediate $5,000 pay bump. The House stuck to its proposal while the Senate upped its to a $6,000 annual raise phased in over three years. In the end, due to competing budget demands such as $1.17 billion reserved for the Mississippi Division Medicaid, the $2,000 increase was what fit into the roughly $3.4 billion allocation for K-12 education in Fiscal Year 2027.
Sen. Dennis DeBar, a Republican from Leakesville and chair of the Senate Education Committee, said during negotiations over the weekend that lawmakers will circle back to teacher pay next year.
“There’s nothing that says we can’t do a pay raise again next year,” DeBar said. “However, we didn’t want to lock ourselves in somewhere we couldn’t pay.”
DeBar’s comment did not mitigate widespread concerns among the state’s teachers – plenty of which have been voiced on social media – who are among the lowest-paid in the country. House Education Chairman Rob Roberson, a Republican from Starkville, took to the House floor on Wednesday and addressed those complaints about the raise not being large enough.
“Protest it. Don’t take it,” Roberson said. “When you roll out here, and you meet another state employee (like) the guy who works on the side of the road for the state, ask him how many pay raises he’s gotten. You know what the answer is? None. We are trying our best to do what we can.”
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Even with Mississippi making recent strides in education — including a No. 16 national ranking in 2025 after decades at the bottom — the state’s average starting teacher salary of $42,492 is No. 40 in the U.S., and its average salary of $53,704 is last. Those numbers are from the National Education Association.
Add in the $2,000 raise, an average salary of $55,704 would jump Florida ($54,875), Missouri ($55,132), and West Virginia ($55,516). West Virginia lawmakers, however, passed a 3% boost in teacher pay in mid-March. The salary bump rounds out to just over $1,665 on average, elevating the state back over Mississippi at $57,181.
As part of Mississippi’s proposal, lawmakers also approved a $5,000 raise for school attendance officers and funding to hire nine more. School attendance officers, per the legislation, can also receive annual salary supplements from their local districts. The plan would ensure one attendance officer for every 4,000 students statewide as the public-school system grapples with chronic absenteeism.
Attendance officers are responsible for investigating unexcused absences, making home visits, and coordinating with families and courts to improve dropout rates. According to the Mississippi Department of Education, more than a quarter of public-school students missed over 10% of the 2024-25 school year.