The Associated School Boards of South Dakota have a plan for starting to raise our rock-bottom teacher salaries to competitive levels by charging more sales tax in the summer:
The average salary for a teacher in South Dakota is $40,023, and even that amount is not competitive with neighboring states, according to data presented to lawmakers.
North Dakota teachers earn $48,666 a year on average, compared to $49,545 in Nebraska, $51,662 in Iowa and $57,230 in Minnesota. South Dakota has the lowest teacher salaries in the country, according to older data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
"Where are you going to go as a teacher?" SASD Executive Director Rob Monson said. "We identify it as a critical problem right now."
To catch up with North Dakota, the state would have to spend an extra $80 million a year on teacher salaries. By increasing sales tax by a penny in June, July and August, the state would be able to increase its average pay for teachers to about $44,000 – still short of North Dakota, but a start, [ASBSD exec Wade] Pogany said [Patrick Anderson, "Higher Teacher Pay from Sales Tax? One Lawmaker Says Yes," that Sioux Falls paper, 2014.09.08].
Joe Lowe proposed something like this during the Democratic gubernatorial primary last spring. The proposal is one eighth of the initiated measure that voters rejected in 2012 to add an extra penny to the sales tax and split the proceeds between education and health care.
ASBSD received the usual statements of interest in a conversation from lawmakers at yesterday's Legislative Planning Committee meeting but no firm commitments to turn this plan or any other into action to end the embarrassing exploitation of teachers that has is driving oodles of talent out of South Dakota's K-12 labor pool.
The paucity of respect, guts, and imagination in Pierre leaves us grasping for suboptimal solutions like expanding our regressive taxes instead of following the example of our bank income tax, changing the productivity tax into a real and fairer agricultural income tax, and looking for other sources of revenue that would not heap the burden of supporting schools further on low-income citizens. We've got to do something, but let's seek better, fairer revenue sources for our teachers and our future before we dig ourselves deeper into dependence on sales tax.
