NASHVILLE – While Gov. Bill Lee is proposing to spend an additional $117 million on educators’ pay in his new budget, with his administration projecting it would generate a 4% salary increase, Tennessee Education Association officials say the percentage increase will be less.
The Republican governor announced the proposal Monday night during his annual State of the State address to the GOP-led General Assembly. He called it the state’s “largest investment in K-12 teacher salaries in Tennessee history.”
But Beth Brown, president of the Tennessee Education Association, later said “this investment of $117 million into the Basic Education Program funding formula is not actually going to be the 4% that the governor is projecting for Tennessee’s educators.”
The Grundy County teacher said “it becomes even more of an issue for those rural districts who don’t have the tax base to make up for what the state’s not funding.” Last year, Brown noted, there was a “lot of talk how much money the state had been sending in state raises over the past five years. And I told them I’ve not gotten anything.”
A major problem with Lee’s proposal, Brown and others say, is a 2014 change in the state’s State Minimum Salary Schedule. It was pushed by then-Gov. Bill Haslam’s administration and his education commissioner, Kevin Huffman, said Jim Wrye, the teachers union’s communications and government affairs chief.