What Do Local Educators Think About The Area's 4th-best Teacher Pay Ranking?

Teacher pay is the subject of this month’s Time magazine cover story, and recently educators in West Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Arizona and Kentucky have taken to strikes and picket lines to seek increased pay. And a just released SmartAsset study ranked the Kingsport-Bristol Combined Statistical Area No. 4 in the nation among the best places for teachers to work, based on, among other things, a lower housing cost and increase in pay over the past two years. Teachers and other educators interviewed agreed the region is a great place to teach, but teachers said housing costs no less than $600 a month for them, the average for the area. The study found the average teacher pay was $50,167, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers for 2017, and the average housing cost was $594, the lowest of the study’s more than 130 areas, although some local teachers said their monthly mortgage payments exceeded that by hundreds of dollars. HOW MUCH DO TEACHERS MAKE? According to the Tennessee Education Association website, from 2017-18 teacher pay in the five Tennessee school systems covered in the local CSA ranges from a low of $35,303 in Sullivan County for a first-year teacher with a bachelor’s degree to a high of $72,236 in Bristol for teachers with a doctorate and 31 or more years of experience. In Kingsport for 2017-18, the TEA said teacher pay ranged from $47,000 to $74,000 on a 91-step salary scale that is a single lane unlike others in the region.