Teacher salaries and funding for education are hot topics at the state legislature. The Joint Appropriations committee is hearing about education issues and funding all this week. Joy Smolnisky is the executive director of the South Dakota Budget and Policy Institute, which conducts independent research on fiscal policy options and the potential effect on South Dakotans. Smolnisky brought forward data that shows South Dakota’s teachers suffer because there’s no set system to increase their pay, where as other state employees are eligible for a program called PACE that increases their salaries to make them more competitive to other states.
“If I went in and I looked at that analysis and I took out PACE, the move to market. If you took PACE out of this, teachers are doing about the same as staff is. What’s happened is that we don’t have a PACE, a move to market, funding mechanism in public education. We have the flat three percent, or whatever you decide it’s gonna be,” Smolnisky says.
Current South Dakota teacher salaries average just under $40,000 a year, but Smolnisky says they would be just under $50,000 had they been raised at the same rate as state employee salary policies.
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