After the pandemic, inflation and cost of housing made starting to teach in Montana very difficult.
But a new program, passed by the 2025 Legislature, has already boosted starting teacher pay and kept districts from struggling with open positions, according to school leaders. In fact, the program has become so successful that nearly every district has been able to leverage it to help retain early-career teachers.
But it was House Bill 252, Student and Teacher Advancement for Results and Success Act, or “STARS,” passed by the 2025 Legislature, that helped boost the starting pay. For districts, it meant a stretch of the budget: The new law says that for districts to qualify for the funding, the starting teacher salary must be 62% of the district-wide average. This helps teachers get to the average level more quickly.
During the Legislature, teachers told of not being able to teach school without a second job, or struggling to find housing even somewhat affordable. A look at most national metrics showed Montana hovered somewhere near the bottom of the nation when it came to starting-teacher salaries — below most nearby states.
For years, Montana had been accused of favoring mid- and later-career teachers at the expense of newly minted professionals. Most districts rejected that notion, but said that unions and schools had more teachers with experience pushing for competitive wages while teachers who were dissatisfied left quickly, leaving fewer voices to advocate to unions and school districts to raise the minimum. Moreover, routine annual raises of 2% to 3%, during the course of a teaching career compounded to better salaries in the cycle of raises, meaning that those who had made it past the first few lean years of teaching salaries were more likely to see an affordable wage.
Erwin Garcia, the superintendent of Billings Public Schools, the largest public school district in the state, said that his district was seeing as many as 100 teachers per year leaving. He noted that not all of the pressure was coming from the pay.
“Most people referred to the mental health of students and the behavior,” Garcia said.
And statistics bear that out: The district recorded the number of times a student struck a teacher — in 2013, the number was zero; last year, it was 33. Eighty-eight percent of those instances were in elementary school, with many being in kindergarten. Garcia believes what children are experiencing at home is brought into a classroom, and teachers begin to modify and teach better behavior.
Lance Melton, the chief executive officer of the Montana School Boards Association, gave an example of how the new program works. He said Kalispell’s starting pay was 56% of the average salary, so the base salary was increased by roughly 6% for new teachers. He said the goal is for the starting salary to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of average pay for districts to retain the most staff. He said the program has given districts the flexibility to scale their own pay scale, because, for example, the base cost of living in Bozeman or Missoula may be different than Billings or Miles City.
Melton also said that previous efforts looked at the average teacher salary, but that often ignored the base salary, meaning it was harder to recruit and retain teachers.
Garcia said the Billings district did other things to help the school year, including trimming some programs in order to fund fully priorities. For example, one other item Billings Public Schools tried is shortening the school year by increasing the teacher-pupil instruction time. In other words, the length of the school day extended, but the number of days shortened, making it more attractive to teachers as well as parents who want a longer summer break.
Even since the program was implemented, the number of vacancies dropped in Billings from 100 to 30.
While Billings had to stretch to make the budget work, Garcia said all districts in Montana and beyond are struggling, the smaller raises were not keeping pace with the cost of living. The STARS program brings the base level up.
“So when we were giving the teachers a raise, we were not just doing them a favor, we were being fair because $40,000 in 2020 is not what $40,000 is in 2025. What we were really giving, as a district, was being eaten up by inflation,” Garcia said.
He said getting starting teachers earning more is also a quality-of-life-issue: He said he knew teachers working an extra job after school and one on weekends.
“It’s pretty depressing if you have to work a second or a third job. Your quality-of-life is diminished,” Garcia said.
Melton said that the Legislature was able to thread the fine needle between state help and local control. While the state doesn’t mandate any district use STARS, almost every district has in order to bring starting salaries up. He sees that as the surest sign of success.
Montana’s demographics also make it difficult, Melton said. In 1996, public schools had 165,000 kids enrolled — roughly 17.4% of the population. Since then, the overall population has grown, but the number of school-aged children has dropped, causing the percentage to shrink to just above 14%. Those percentages may not sound drastic, but that’s an 11% decrease, and funding is figured on a per-student basis.
Melton said the decline in students hasn’t necessarily meant that districts could cut 11% their budgets because of inflation and overhead costs. As an example, a classroom of 23 where three students leave, means a loss of more than $25,000 for the district, but the resources needed, including a teacher, will not decrease by the same amount.
If Montana’s school-aged demographics had simply kept pace, Montana would have nearly 217,000 students enrolled in public schools. While the population decline is substantial, the amount of money schools get has also decreased.
“When COVID came along, it was an inflection point because we were already behind and then we fell behind because of inflation,” Melton said. “COVID relief funds kind of masked it, but we were already falling behind.”
He said the new increases help put districts back in a position to be competitive.
“This helps with attrition, gives teachers a better of vision of having a comfortable lifestyle,” Melton said.
This story first appeared in the Daily Montanan. Read the original here.
