Mississippi Senate Bill Could Reduce New Teacher Benefits

The Senate is considering a plan to erase one of the few reasons to enter the teaching field in Mississippi, potentially decimating applications from new teachers. Photo credit: Katrina Holmes

While the state legislature mulls gutting the budget, the Mississippi Senate is moving forward with a bill to create a new tier in the Mississippi Public Employees' Retirement (PERS) system that will likely impact how many prospective teachers apply for jobs in the state. 

Mississippi’s teacher shortage is a critical issue for the state, especially in rural areas—and Mississippi is a very rural state. The Mississippi Department of Education’s 2024-2025 Educator Shortage Survey uncovered nearly 5,160 statewide teacher, administrative and support staff vacancies, an increase over the 2023-24 school year. Entry-level teachers with maximum accreditation make $45k a year, while more common “AAA” certified teachers earn $44k. This means educators in the state’s woefully underserved Delta territory can cross the state border into neighboring Arkansas and nab an extra $5,000. Being so deftly outcompeted by its neighbors, it’s no surprise state education superintendent Lance Evans is proposing a plan to simply live with a permanent teacher shortage. Evans proposed hiring 12 teachers to oversee an online English and algebra class for potentially thousands of students without an in-person educator. For that to work, Mississippi must first contend with numerous issues tied to poverty and slow internet capacity, which BGX has covered before. 

But now the Senate is considering a plan to erase one of the few reasons to enter the teaching field in Mississippi: state benefits. Senate Bill 2439 creates a controversial new fifth PERS tier for employees hired on or after July 1, 2025. The new tier does not provide an annual cost-of-living adjustment for the retirement allowance, which essentially reduces all new employees to second-class status. 

With all the tax cuts being batted around this year you would not think the state is facing almost $90 billion in unfunded accrued retirement benefits entirely of state leaders’ own doing. For more than a decade, anti-government hawks in charge of state government have pushed for massive privatization of government services, from call centers to child support collections. In 2016, Ridgeland company Young Williams announced a contract to take over almost a quarter of a million child support cases throughout the state. But every time the government shuts down a public job or hires work out to contractors, they reduce the number of active workers paying into the state’s public retirement.  

The yellow portion of the chart above shows the state’s unfunded obligation, thanks to rampant government outsourcing obliterating the PERS retirement fund. Legislators hope new teachers will help cover the shortfall by working for less retirement benefits than other state employees. 

The state has lost more than 5,000 total active PERS members since 2020, dropping from about 150,000 contributors in 2020, to about 145,000 contributors in 2022. Both of those years represent an even steeper drop from 2014, when the state had 161,000 total active members.   

All this downsizing has undermined PERS coffers to the point where the state legislature must now bail out the state’s retirement fund with massive payments to keep the fund solvent. The self-inflicted shortfall is also the reason senators are considering creating the controversial new fifth retirement tier that nobody should want to join, particularly teachers. Or firemen, for that matter. Or cops. 

Meanwhile, deficit hawks like State auditor Shad White keep confirming the plunge in state employees while insisting the state “should continue to ‘right size’ government to eliminate waste.”