Last week the News & Observer ran a story titled Wake County’s average teacher salary hits $50,000 for the first time. According to school system’s annual financial report (see page 108), the average teacher salary in Wake County was $50,803.
In September 2016, I published a blog post titled Average Wake Teacher Pay over 53K. I obtained teacher salaries for over 9,900 WCPSS teachers via a public records request.
What did I find? According to our analysis, average teacher pay in Wake County was $53,603. We also found 57 percent of all Wake County teachers had salaries over $50,000.
So who’s right?
Officials at WCPSS, said the data cited in the report was pulled from March 2016 and did not include increases that became effective July 1st.
That’s interesting. The figure quoted for average teacher salary ($50,803) shows that most teachers had already surpassed the $50,000 average earlier this year before the General Assembly approved an average teacher pay increase of 4.7 percent. So when you include raises that went into effect July 1st, average teacher pay for Wake County teachers is actually considerably higher.
I’ll stand by my figure; $53,603.
And…..? I guess NCCivitas is hinting that teachers are an even greater burden on NC taxpayers than ever before.
No, George, what I’m saying is that the average teacher salary in Wake County is not $50,000 but $53,000.