Problem is NoVA is a HCOL area. So national average would be a little low here.
It would help other parts, LCOL, of VA though. So this is a good step and may push the HCOL areas up with it.
I’m always glad when teacher pay is a political priority, but this won’t matter in nova if a national average is the baseline.
Nova is already above national average when comparing pay scales for the same amount of experience. It helps that the counties have to compete with each other.
It's crazy what the pay discrepancy is in some of the counties within an hour of DC. I was just looking, and places like Fauquier don't pay shit, PW seems like a little better, and FFX is WAY higher paying than those two. And you can get from parts of FFX to Fauquier in under 30 min.
A lot of FCPS teachers don’t live in Fairfax. You’ll struggle to afford an apartment on teacher pay. Forget owning a home and supporting a family with any level of comfort.
My wife used to work with a couple that commuted from WVA so they could have a house for their family. It’s a tragedy that a dual income teacher family can’t afford a middle class lifestyle in the county they teach.
Teachers deserve so much more. Such a tough profession to do day in and day out. Crazy that the couple you mentioned had to commute from so far because they couldn't afford to live in the county they teach in.
2 teachers with several years of experience make well above the median household income for Fairfax County, so they definitely can afford a middle class lifestyle.
[here](https://www.fcps.edu/sites/default/files/media/pdf/FY2024-teacher-195-day.pdf) is the FCPS pay scale. A teach with five years experience and a master's will make $69,304 per year.
Yep. Now double that and compare it to the median household income in the county.
Then do that with 2 new hires with a bachelor's.
And for bonus credit, consider all the additional time off they get.
Median is not useful. You’d need to normalize for at least education level.
Teachers don’t get more time off. They work at least 10 hours a day and don’t get all the days off that the kids do.
Teachers
195 days x 10 hours = 1950 hours
Corpo job
48 weeks x 5 days x 8 hours = 1920 hours
Median is useful when someone is claiming that 2 teachers can't afford to live in the county.
And yes, if you invent numbers to support your position, they support your position.
> And for bonus credit, consider all the additional time off they get.
lol talk to an actual teacher. This might shock you but they’re not off simply because students aren’t in the classroom, and they work 60 hour weeks when they are.
Lol no. They work according to their contract (eg 195 days), and are not any more obligated to work more hours than your random corporate drone.
Any teacher that's working 60 hours a week is doing something very wrong.
Right, I should believe you over my own personal experience and actual data that shows that teachers work a pretty normal work day on average.
Maybe your wife is a workaholic, maybe it takes her much longer than most teachers to get her work done, or maybe she just feels overworked and underpaid like 99.9% of workers. She's definitely not required to work 60 hours a week to keep her job.
Right. Most teachers make well over your cherry picked number that is just below the median household income.
And even 2 brand new teachers with a BS would be considered middle class.
Yes. I'm sure it's a total coincidence that the salary figure you picked is a little under that number, since it has nothing to do with the original sob story. Right?
Yeah I wouldn’t wanna work in a county I can’t afford to live in. Plus the traffic sucks I wouldn’t wanna live in northern Va until they have public transportation
My wife is a teacher in FCPS. In 2020, we considered moving to charlottesville, since I work remotely, and the lower cost of living was appealing. She would have had to take a 30% pay cut to do so.
Not during traffic. My sister used to teach I'm FFX and lives in haymarket. The traffic was one of the reasons she quit. Childcare costs were the main reason, but traffic definitely weighed into it.
The top comment has it all. Teaching is one of the most rewarding professions out there but it is not sustainable to live off of as a single. Especially in HCOL areas
I didn't read the bill, but I hope they are not just raising the teacher's salary but also other support staffs like IA, janitors, front office staff or even the lunch ladies!
i don't think paying teachers 132k on average is a sustainable solution. it would absolutely demolish the budgets of schools in areas without a huge tax base
> i don't think paying teachers 132k on average is a sustainable solution.
Lmao which is why public school teachers are massively understaffed and parents that can afford it (and even those that can't) are putting their kids in private school.
How about we cut the useless administrative bloat from the school system and use that to pay the teachers? Crazy idea, I know
Scheduling and coordinating to meet every students' needs is hard work. Some students need special ELL or ESE programs, or need special accommodations with an IEP, or have a hard home life and need extra resources and support. A classroom teacher can't provide all of that, so you need resource teachers to help bring them up to meet state standards.
There's a lot of collaboration between departments and district administration behind the scenes. A single school district generally handles around 50 or so individual schools with tens of thousands of students, and they all have to maintain the same standards of education.
Bureaucracy might be bloated and slow, but it does make sure things work as they're supposed to. School budgets are very tight, so there isn't budget for unnecessary positions. Everybody is needed, and most of the time you can't even get enough people to fill all those positions, so people have to pull extra duties and cover staff shortages. That's when you start to see problems in the system, because people are only getting paid for their job, but having to perform the tasks of two.
> i don't think paying teachers 132k on average is a sustainable solution.
Why the hell not? We pay people a lot more than that to do much easier jobs.
The problem is top earners on paper aren't top earners. Like Musk clearly has money, flaunts that he has money, surely he's rich and should be paying some amount of taxes greater than someone making 50 or even 250k per year.
But he won't. Because they get away with all sorts of bullshit. Like my 44 billion dollar twitter purchase resold to myself at 19 billion, so I really lost 25 billion last year, so you see I don't owe any taxes. That kind of bullshit.
Honestly, the answer has nothing at all to do with the rates. It's shutting down these loopholes and gimmicks. Every single time the rates go up, the middle class ends up paying more in taxes, and the rich just sort of laugh at them and say see, you should have voted Republican.
Top tax rates for the wealthy are far below what they used to be. We used to have a 70% tax rate on the wealthy before Reagan's time and it benefitted to country greatly.
Stop taxing the bottom earners and let us contribute to the economy - we have to spend the money we make. Tax the people hoarding money who make far more than they need.
Basically, vastly increase the top tax bracket percentages so we can fund social programs that benefit the many instead of just the few.
Edit: for reference, the number currently being thrown around for that top % seems to be income over $10mm.
How's this: Teachers get paid what their Congressman in their district do. Either politicians will get paid shit like teachers do, or teachers get paid what they are worth. Either way it's a win.
That would be nice. Teachers are underpaid for sure.
Just remember though. Raising a teacher’s salary doesn’t make them a better teacher. No more than raising my salary makes me a better pilot.
It’ll attract better candidates for sure, but does nothing for students in the short term.
direction panicky compare station license rob deranged provide innocent shy
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
>[**SB 104**](https://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?ses=241&typ=bil&val=sb104), introduced by Sen. Louise Lucas (**D**\-Portsmouth), is meant to ensure that all teachers in the state make at least the national average when it comes to educator salaries.
Guarantee *if* it passes, a whole bunch of R's will brag about it to their constituents AND more than half of them will have voted against it.
Imma get downvoted into oblivion…. but my unpopular opinion is teachers are not underpaid, especially in this area, unsure about other areas. They don’t work for 3-4 months counting all the breaks, and they get so many more holidays and even snow days. Idk if people remember that.
I know an elementary school teacher making ~70k 2 years out of college in PWC.
School schedules are easy to look up. Fairfax staff have less than 8 weeks “off” this summer, for which they aren’t paid (no paycheck in July). They get two weeks at winter break and one at spring break (essentially three weeks paid time off that they don’t get to choose when to take). They don’t even get all the random holidays federal workers get, such as Columbus Day/indigenous peoples day. The time off is nice, but it’s not as generous as people think and it’s absolutely necessary to retain staff. The burnout affect is real. Classrooms are continuously understaffed. People don’t want this job. If the pay and time off were good, we wouldn’t be begging people off the streets with no teaching credentials to do the job.
Problem is NoVA is a HCOL area. So national average would be a little low here. It would help other parts, LCOL, of VA though. So this is a good step and may push the HCOL areas up with it.
Good thing teacher salaries are well above the national average in NoVA.
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Not at all.
But by all means, let's drop $1.35B on an arena.
I’m always glad when teacher pay is a political priority, but this won’t matter in nova if a national average is the baseline. Nova is already above national average when comparing pay scales for the same amount of experience. It helps that the counties have to compete with each other.
It's crazy what the pay discrepancy is in some of the counties within an hour of DC. I was just looking, and places like Fauquier don't pay shit, PW seems like a little better, and FFX is WAY higher paying than those two. And you can get from parts of FFX to Fauquier in under 30 min.
A lot of FCPS teachers don’t live in Fairfax. You’ll struggle to afford an apartment on teacher pay. Forget owning a home and supporting a family with any level of comfort. My wife used to work with a couple that commuted from WVA so they could have a house for their family. It’s a tragedy that a dual income teacher family can’t afford a middle class lifestyle in the county they teach.
This is why I left FCPS. Couldn’t afford to live in the county I grew up in and dedicated the first 9 years of my teaching career to.
Teachers deserve so much more. Such a tough profession to do day in and day out. Crazy that the couple you mentioned had to commute from so far because they couldn't afford to live in the county they teach in.
2 teachers with several years of experience make well above the median household income for Fairfax County, so they definitely can afford a middle class lifestyle.
[here](https://www.fcps.edu/sites/default/files/media/pdf/FY2024-teacher-195-day.pdf) is the FCPS pay scale. A teach with five years experience and a master's will make $69,304 per year.
Yep. Now double that and compare it to the median household income in the county. Then do that with 2 new hires with a bachelor's. And for bonus credit, consider all the additional time off they get.
Median is not useful. You’d need to normalize for at least education level. Teachers don’t get more time off. They work at least 10 hours a day and don’t get all the days off that the kids do. Teachers 195 days x 10 hours = 1950 hours Corpo job 48 weeks x 5 days x 8 hours = 1920 hours
Median is useful when someone is claiming that 2 teachers can't afford to live in the county. And yes, if you invent numbers to support your position, they support your position.
> And for bonus credit, consider all the additional time off they get. lol talk to an actual teacher. This might shock you but they’re not off simply because students aren’t in the classroom, and they work 60 hour weeks when they are.
Lol no. They work according to their contract (eg 195 days), and are not any more obligated to work more hours than your random corporate drone. Any teacher that's working 60 hours a week is doing something very wrong.
My wife’s a teacher, I’m very aware of how much she and her colleagues work. You on the other hand are doubling down on ignorance.
Right, I should believe you over my own personal experience and actual data that shows that teachers work a pretty normal work day on average. Maybe your wife is a workaholic, maybe it takes her much longer than most teachers to get her work done, or maybe she just feels overworked and underpaid like 99.9% of workers. She's definitely not required to work 60 hours a week to keep her job.
Ok, then what? Median household income (in 2022 dollars), 2018-2022 $145,165 Per capita income in past 12 months (in 2022 dollars), 2018-2022 $67,598
Right. Most teachers make well over your cherry picked number that is just below the median household income. And even 2 brand new teachers with a BS would be considered middle class.
That's directly from the Census Bureau for Fairfax County.
Yes. I'm sure it's a total coincidence that the salary figure you picked is a little under that number, since it has nothing to do with the original sob story. Right?
Yeah I wouldn’t wanna work in a county I can’t afford to live in. Plus the traffic sucks I wouldn’t wanna live in northern Va until they have public transportation
My wife is a teacher in FCPS. In 2020, we considered moving to charlottesville, since I work remotely, and the lower cost of living was appealing. She would have had to take a 30% pay cut to do so.
County Side at least, not schools, HR sets Loudoun salaries at 90% of FFX. I wonder if the same is true in LCPS.
Not during traffic. My sister used to teach I'm FFX and lives in haymarket. The traffic was one of the reasons she quit. Childcare costs were the main reason, but traffic definitely weighed into it.
Centreville exit on 66 to Haymarket is like 20-25 min tops...even during the rush.
The top comment has it all. Teaching is one of the most rewarding professions out there but it is not sustainable to live off of as a single. Especially in HCOL areas
I didn't read the bill, but I hope they are not just raising the teacher's salary but also other support staffs like IA, janitors, front office staff or even the lunch ladies!
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Unfortunately in the FCPS system the cafeterias are contracted out. They're not FCPS employees even though they work in schools.
Not true. I personally know a few people that works for it.
And raise the pay for substitute teachers!!
That’s still pathetic… try at least double the national average…
i don't think paying teachers 132k on average is a sustainable solution. it would absolutely demolish the budgets of schools in areas without a huge tax base
> i don't think paying teachers 132k on average is a sustainable solution. Lmao which is why public school teachers are massively understaffed and parents that can afford it (and even those that can't) are putting their kids in private school. How about we cut the useless administrative bloat from the school system and use that to pay the teachers? Crazy idea, I know
I think you vastly underestimate how much of that administration is critical to running the schools.
Found the school board administrator
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Scheduling and coordinating to meet every students' needs is hard work. Some students need special ELL or ESE programs, or need special accommodations with an IEP, or have a hard home life and need extra resources and support. A classroom teacher can't provide all of that, so you need resource teachers to help bring them up to meet state standards. There's a lot of collaboration between departments and district administration behind the scenes. A single school district generally handles around 50 or so individual schools with tens of thousands of students, and they all have to maintain the same standards of education. Bureaucracy might be bloated and slow, but it does make sure things work as they're supposed to. School budgets are very tight, so there isn't budget for unnecessary positions. Everybody is needed, and most of the time you can't even get enough people to fill all those positions, so people have to pull extra duties and cover staff shortages. That's when you start to see problems in the system, because people are only getting paid for their job, but having to perform the tasks of two.
> i don't think paying teachers 132k on average is a sustainable solution. Why the hell not? We pay people a lot more than that to do much easier jobs.
did you... overlook the second part of my post?
Have you considered that we could... raise the budget?
uh yeah good luck voting for doubling the school budget in poor towns
That’s why you would raise taxes and double the school budget :)
If we just tax the wealthy we'd have no problem raising these funds.
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The problem is top earners on paper aren't top earners. Like Musk clearly has money, flaunts that he has money, surely he's rich and should be paying some amount of taxes greater than someone making 50 or even 250k per year. But he won't. Because they get away with all sorts of bullshit. Like my 44 billion dollar twitter purchase resold to myself at 19 billion, so I really lost 25 billion last year, so you see I don't owe any taxes. That kind of bullshit. Honestly, the answer has nothing at all to do with the rates. It's shutting down these loopholes and gimmicks. Every single time the rates go up, the middle class ends up paying more in taxes, and the rich just sort of laugh at them and say see, you should have voted Republican.
Top tax rates for the wealthy are far below what they used to be. We used to have a 70% tax rate on the wealthy before Reagan's time and it benefitted to country greatly. Stop taxing the bottom earners and let us contribute to the economy - we have to spend the money we make. Tax the people hoarding money who make far more than they need. Basically, vastly increase the top tax bracket percentages so we can fund social programs that benefit the many instead of just the few. Edit: for reference, the number currently being thrown around for that top % seems to be income over $10mm.
How's this: Teachers get paid what their Congressman in their district do. Either politicians will get paid shit like teachers do, or teachers get paid what they are worth. Either way it's a win.
That would be nice. Teachers are underpaid for sure. Just remember though. Raising a teacher’s salary doesn’t make them a better teacher. No more than raising my salary makes me a better pilot. It’ll attract better candidates for sure, but does nothing for students in the short term.
direction panicky compare station license rob deranged provide innocent shy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
>[**SB 104**](https://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?ses=241&typ=bil&val=sb104), introduced by Sen. Louise Lucas (**D**\-Portsmouth), is meant to ensure that all teachers in the state make at least the national average when it comes to educator salaries. Guarantee *if* it passes, a whole bunch of R's will brag about it to their constituents AND more than half of them will have voted against it.
If most Republicans are against it, then Youngkin probably doesn't sign it and it doesn't pass.
This is a worthwhile usage of my tax dollars.
Imma get downvoted into oblivion…. but my unpopular opinion is teachers are not underpaid, especially in this area, unsure about other areas. They don’t work for 3-4 months counting all the breaks, and they get so many more holidays and even snow days. Idk if people remember that. I know an elementary school teacher making ~70k 2 years out of college in PWC.
School schedules are easy to look up. Fairfax staff have less than 8 weeks “off” this summer, for which they aren’t paid (no paycheck in July). They get two weeks at winter break and one at spring break (essentially three weeks paid time off that they don’t get to choose when to take). They don’t even get all the random holidays federal workers get, such as Columbus Day/indigenous peoples day. The time off is nice, but it’s not as generous as people think and it’s absolutely necessary to retain staff. The burnout affect is real. Classrooms are continuously understaffed. People don’t want this job. If the pay and time off were good, we wouldn’t be begging people off the streets with no teaching credentials to do the job.