Troubles in teaching: Bipartisan efforts to recruit, keep teachers
Emma White
HELENA (UM Legislative News Service) - Adam Clinch is a realist. He’s a math teacher who has spent his life analyzing numbers, and he knows what the stagnating teacher pay in Montana means for him and his family.
Clinch loves teaching at Capitol High School in Helena, but he’s starting to worry about the financial prospects of his career. As a backup plan, he’s started to take a coding class in his free time so he will have an option to switch careers if the trend of low pay and a rising cost of living continues.
“I think it'd be crazy for me to continue down the road I am without at least having an opportunity to pivot,” Clinch said in an interview. “It's unsustainable for a person to lose money year over year and stay in a career.”
Clinch is not alone in his worries – it’s becoming increasingly difficult to be a teacher in Montana. Modest pay raises for teachers can’t compete with skyrocketing inflation and as the costs of housing, insurance and living expenses grow, the gap between what comes in and what goes out seems wider every year.
Add to that the reality that working within a school’s tight budget often means a heavier workload for teachers who are already navigating an increasingly complicated job. Starting teachers in particular are straining under the weight of big responsibilities and small paychecks.
Experts agree that Montana’s public-school systems are at a critical point. So, lawmakers in Helena are brainstorming new ways to improve teacher recruitment and retention and take some of the pressure off of teachers in the state.
STARS Act: Recruiting New Teachers
Like Clinch, Rep. Llew Jones, R-Conrad, is a numbers guy. Jones drafted the STARS Act with the idea that the best way to change human behavior is through financial incentives designed to produce a desired outcome.
“STARS” stands for “student and teacher advancement for results and success” and the act would be created by House Bill 252, which Jones is sponsoring. The bill would focus on raising teacher pay in Montana to address the growing difficulties faced by public school districts. The House of Representatives passed the bill on an 88-to-9 vote on Feb. 22 and it now heads to the Senate for debate.
The STARS Act is a result of collaboration with schools and administrators across the state, Jones said, in an attempt to close the gap that inflation has created in teacher wages over the past few years, along with other programs geared toward improving public education systems such as the improvement of career and technical programs and dual enrollment opportunities, both of which Jones has been a champion of in his long tenure in the Montana Legislature.
The idea is to compress the teacher pay scale to raise beginning teacher wages, which have been at national lows in Montana over the past 20 years. It would provide additional funding to school districts who manage to bring beginning teacher wages up to 70% of the average teacher wages in the state.
Jones said the gap between starting teacher pay and senior teacher pay needs to be solved before the pay scale can be raised for all teachers. According to a 2024 study from the Montana Department of Labor, Montana teachers’ average salary was $58,600, putting them 34th in the nation for teacher pay. But the average starting salary for teachers was $38,800, placing Montana 46th in the nation and ranking it below surrounding states.
Rep. Melissa Romano, D-Helena, vice chair of the House Education Committee and a teacher in her regular life, said STARS is a “good start,” though she has some concerns about a few of the financial hurdles that districts must clear to receive the funds.
“I am concerned … about the hoops that districts may have to jump through in order to qualify for the money, in fact,” Romano said.
Romano said she’d spoken to district leaders who are worried about meeting the requirements in the bill, and about the bill’s potential to tie their hands when negotiating with their local unions. She added that the money from STARS only helps one segment of the teacher population, when all of them are struggling from inflation over the past five years.
“This is great money, but it's really intended for beginning-year teachers,” Romano said. “And like everyone knows, you can't just raise the floor, like you've got to raise everything else as well.”
Romano still stressed that the bill is an important start, and she is one of the co-signers on the bill.
Head of the Montana School Board Association Lance Melton said from his research across the state, he concluded that the districts in the state have been alerted and are ready to comply.
He added that STARS is the first necessary step to close the inflation gap that started to open in 2020.
“If we do that, we'll be positioned to think more creatively,” Melton said. “We won't be going in and studying, hey, what will it take to survive?”
Jones’s response to the concerns voiced at the bill’s first hearing was that STARS includes enough money to raise the scale once pay scales are equalized. The caveat, he said, was that districts would have to compress the scale in order to access the money.
“The argument being made is, throw money at it. We'll fix it,” Jones said. “We have been throwing money at it, and this is the result has been this extremely wide scale, right? To me, the definition of insanity is to keep doing that and expect it'll get better.”
BEST Program: Mentoring New Teachers
Romano remembers well the feeling of overwhelm she experienced when trying to teach a class for the first time. She is carrying a bill she says is close to her heart that would help new teachers by pairing them with senior educators to learn skills in the classroom.
When she was a young teacher, Romano relied on the support of her elder teachers to help her learn to teach a different grade level than the one she student taught.
“My student teaching experience was in a fourth-grade classroom, and my first job, I got placed in a second-grade classroom, and I was terrified,” Romano said. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I don't know how to teach kids how to read.”
Her feelings were exacerbated by her being the only second-grade teacher in a small school.
“I really relied on teachers in my school to help me,” Romano said. “And I also came to realize that they had other lives and jobs and it wasn't always easy for them.”
Teacher mentorship has been a passion of Romano’s for a long time, she said, and she keeps a second job teaching student teachers on top of her regular career. She wants this program to create more structure by pairing new teachers with experienced teachers as their designated mentors.
She added that programs like the one proposed in her House Bill 340 are more important in Montana because of the growing need for emergency authorization educators, or people who are temporarily assigned teaching authority if a district is short on teachers. This happens most often in rural districts.
According to statistics from the Montana Office of Public Instruction, there were 134 total cases of emergency authorization in 2022, and 311 cases in 2024. Romano said many of these temporary educators could really benefit from a program like the one supported in her bill.
HB 340 would enact what’s titled the “BEST” program, which stands for “bolstering educators' support and training.” In the program, early career teachers would be paired with mentor teachers who work in the same content area and the teachers would take part in a structured mentorship program based on “best practices for new teacher support.”
While many school districts already have mentorship programs in place, the bill would help expand and support those programs and jumpstart new ones. The mentor teachers would be trained in the best ways to mentor early career teachers and, contingent on funding appropriated by the Legislature and distributed by the Office of Public Instruction, would be paid a stipend of $2,500. Early career teachers in the program would be paid $600 to be a part of the program, with half of that paid by the school district where the teacher is employed.
The House Education Committee passed the bill out of committee on a 10-5 vote on Feb. 12, but it has yet to be scheduled to be debated and voted on by the full House.
Rep. Marta Bertoglio, R-Clancy, was one of the initial no votes when the bill was in committee, she said because of concerns about the cost of the bill. She said she loved the idea, but imagined it was possible for districts to swing within their current budgets.
But, late last week, she said she had a change of heart after she saw a graph that illustrated the teacher shortage in full detail, and the emergency hires that districts have had to make.
“Well, now I see this map, and I’m like, they don’t have the capability,” Bertoglio said. “They’re just trying to teach.”
In that same vein, Rep. Jamie Isaly, D-Bozeman is proposing legislation that would tweak laws to allow retired teachers to return to work and mentor new teachers. He called House Bill 359 an “easy peasy” solution that could ease new teachers’ transitions into the classroom.
Under the current system, Isaly said, a teacher who retires is unable to return to work in a public school for 121 days after the date of retirement and still keep their retirement benefits. Isaly said his bill will change policy to allow retired teachers to come back to work and be paid to mentor new teachers in the classroom.
“You know, it’s obvious that any support that we can provide our new teachers early on is a good thing, and this bill just prevents a roadblock to one way we can accomplish this,” Isaly said.
One of the proponents at the bill’s hearing early this month was Rob Watson, representing the Coalition of Advocates for Montana’s Public Schools.
“Montana’s education system, much like other education systems in other states, is facing a significant challenge in recruitment and retention,” Watson said. “And I would argue the retention is even harder sometimes than the recruitment.”
He added that many Montana teachers leave the profession in their first five years, and this bill could provide a “common sense solution” that could help to solve this problem.
“These retired teachers bring in valuable information and knowledge and expertise that will help new teachers navigate the classroom, improve instruction practices, and build confidence in their roles,” Watson said.
Isaly’s bill passed through the Montana House of Representatives with a 93-6 vote on Feb. 20 and is on its way to be debated in the Senate.
Clinch, who testified in support of the STARS bill, said he is in support of any attempt to help support sustainability in the teaching profession and increase funding for public schools. He said due to budget cuts at his school, he’s taken on an additional class period each day with no additional pay.
Clinch feels caught in a moral battle between his desire to stay in the public education system and “be a good steward,” and his desire to give his children opportunities. He wants to help without succumbing to “teacher martyrdom.”
He said he never expected to get rich, he knew the reality of the teaching profession when he entered it. But he said it’s discouraging to keep losing financially as he gains experience. He wants to have the security to save for his children’s college and to go on vacations as a family.
“It's hard to save or give them experiences when … I have to account for my career making less money,” Clinch said. “I don't know how long I can continue to justify that.”