HELENA - Dozens of educators and students from across Montana this week painted a dire picture of the financial realities facing public schools, as they and lawmakers got their first detailed look at a much-anticipated proposal to direct millions in state funding toward raising starting teacher pay.
The so-called STARS Act — short for Student and Teacher Advancement for Results and Success — made its debut before the Legislature’s House Education Committee on Wednesday, marking a key milestone on an issue that’s been brewing in the legislative interim for nearly two years.
Proponents packed the small hearing room in the Capitol to share personal reflections on the teacher shortage that drove lawmakers to craft the bill, one of the defining pieces of education policy so far this session. Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte has already committed $100 million to the legislation via his proposed budget for the coming two years.
Some supporters testified before the committee about the financial strain districts have experienced in recent years due to rising inflation, stagnant state funding and challenges passing local property tax levies required to pull down additional state dollars, reports the Montana Free Press. Others spoke directly to the teacher experience — the low wages and high living costs that have made it increasingly difficult to find or hold on to new classroom hires.
“Recruiting and retaining good teachers is harder today than it’s ever been,” Lolo School District Superintendent Dale Olinger told the committee. “I have many staff with a side hustle. It used to be a joke, and now it’s not.”
In testimony, Jacob Warner, a mathematics and robotics teacher at Helena’s Capital High School, said “things have not been easy for teachers. Lately, class sizes have gone up. Teachers in my building are being asked to teach extra classes every spring. Phenomenal teachers in my building get pink slips, causing uncertainty and stress for them, their families and their students.”
Brockton Public Schools Superintendent Josh Patterson told the committee that “finding myself unable to hire or attract, to recruit, American [teacher] candidates, I found myself having to look overseas for foreign teachers. It started off with five, then it grew to 10. Now in year four, I’m at 16 — 16 foreign teachers, all from the Philippines, and that’s due in large part to our inability to recruit good teachers.”
The testimony put a face to the financial hardship that Rep. Llew Jones, R-Conrad, said he hopes to remedy through House Bill 252. Jones’ proposal would effectively double state payments to a district associated with the number of full-time qualified staff it employs, provided the base teacher salary in the district meets certain benchmarks related to its average teacher pay.
The bill also expands the type of employees who generate those payments from just licensed teachers to all licensed staff, allows districts in high-cost areas to raise more local revenue to fund housing assistance for employees, and creates a new “future-ready” payment tied to students who earn career-oriented or college-level credits while in high school.
In addressing the committee, Jones cast the various components of his bill as incentives to help push Montana’s public schools toward better conditions for teachers and students alike.
“If we want the student outcomes to increase, we’ve got to incentivize student outcomes increasing,” he said. “If we want to have a more personalized learning system, we have to create an incentive that allows for it. If we truly believe the best practices across the country are to allow folks to achieve both vision and skill, then incentive it that. Or we can keep doing what we’re doing and change nothing.”
Jones and other lawmakers mapped much of the course charted in the STARS Act during a string of legislative meetings over the past two years following the 2023 session. Their focus on teacher pay as a route to more success and stability in Montana’s public schools gained further backing recently with the release of a report by the Department of Labor and Industry estimating the average wage for an entry-level teacher in the state at $38,800. In a Jan. 8 letter to Jones attached to the report, DLI Director Sarah Swanson also emphasized the role second jobs are playing in teachers’ lives, noting their average earnings from such jobs are $4,700.
“We are one of only two states in the country, us and Florida, that experienced real wage growth for almost every profession last year except for our public educators,” Swanson said Wednesday while testifying in favor of the STARS Act. “This bill represents a very data-driven, thoughtful way to analyze real data that you’ll see in this report to drive meaningful increases to achieve the Legislature’s goal of base pay increases for our educators.”
No one spoke in opposition to the bill Wednesday. But several proponents did express concern over HB 252’s use of average district teacher salaries in calculating the base wages districts would have to meet in order to qualify, arguing the approach may impact union-negotiated pay scales for more experienced teachers. Members of the committee explored that concern further as the hearing approached the two-hour mark, asking Jones why the STARS Act focused so heavily on starting teachers alone.
Jones acknowledged the issue, but replied that money is “a scarce resource” — a point that hasn’t gone unnoticed even among those teachers supportive of raising starting teacher pay but worried about the myriad other financial pressures competing for space in tight district budgets.
“Everybody wants teachers to make more money,” Warner told the committee. “My superintendent has told me time and time again he would like nothing more than to give every teacher the biggest raise in the world. But if the money’s not there, the money’s not there.”
If the STARS Act clears the House Education Committee in the coming weeks, it will advance to the House floor for a vote.
