Frenchtown School District just west of Missoula has been struggling for years to boost pay for its new teachers. Longtime high school history teacher and union president Jim Stanicar says inflation and declining enrollment were hurting the district's budget. Raises had seemed unlikely this year.
“And so, the STARS Act gave us a real lifeline,” Stanicar says.
The STARS Act, a bipartisan law passed earlier this year, offered schools additional money if they raised starting teacher salaries above $41,000.
Frenchtown qualified for that money. Stanicar says instead of a piecemeal pay bump, new teachers are earning thousands more than they did last year.
“Basically, we had been working on it already, and the STARS Act kind of, like, dumped a bunch of gasoline into a preexisting engine,” Stanicar says.
More than 95% of Montana’s public schools got that extra money, according to the state education department. Montana School Boards Association director Lance Melton says that means some teachers in the state’s rural districts likely saw massive raises of 10% to 15%.
“Base teacher pay went up substantially in Montana,” Melton told MTPR in a Zoom interview.
The raises will likely help lift Montana from its last-place ranking for starting teacher pay among U.S. states.
The STARS Act wasn’t the only new money schools received this year. Lawmakers also dumped cash into an account paying for school maintenance and bumped overall state funding by about 3% each of the next two years.
The result is relief for schools that had been crushed by high inflation for years. A new legislative report shows all the new money this year makes up nearly all ground lost to inflation since the pandemic
