How do Bibb County administrator, teacher salaries compare to other schools? What we know
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Amari Rowzee taught language arts at Macon’s Southwest High School for three years as an early-career teacher, but she says low pay was one big reason why she left the district in 2022. She went elsewhere.
“Teachers just were not getting paid enough,” the current Dekalb County School District teacher said. “The salary and other personal issues played a huge role in why I decided not to come back.”
Data backs up Rowzee’s complaint. While entry-level teachers in the Bibb County School District make more than Georgia’s average for entry-level teachers, they make less than first-year teachers in neighboring Houston, Monroe and Twiggs counties.
Georgia’s average starting salary for first-year teachers is $41,148, which ranks No. 39 in the United States, according to the National Education Association 2024 educator pay data. Bibb County’s annual salary for entry-level teachers is $43,549, nearly $5,000 less than Houston County teachers.
Pay for veteran teachers doesn’t match that of the neighboring district either, according to employee compensation studies presented at Bibb County Board of Education budget work sessions. Bibb County teachers with a master’s degree and 10 years of experience receive roughly $10,000 less than Houston County School District educators of the same rank.
The Bibb County Board of Education wants to prevent losing teachers over pay gaps.
Earlier in May, the board tentatively approved giving raises to all certified and classified employees in the 2024-25 school year budget. It’s a move that Superintendent Dan Sims said will help the school district close its teacher and leadership pay gaps compared to other Middle Georgia school systems.
“We’ve worked extremely hard to honor the hard work of all of our employees and getting ourselves in a better space to offer competitive salaries by way of recommendation so that we can attract and retain the best and brightest,” Sims said during the board’s third and final budget work session in early May.
The school system’s teacher retention rate was 75% in 2023, lower than the state average of 89.21%, according to the Georgia Department of Education.
Rowzee said she began teaching in Bibb County in 2019 through its strategic waiver agreement, which enables people going through a career change with bachelor’s degrees or higher to teach despite not having state certification.
A Bibb County provisional teacher’s salary was $35,533 in 2020. Provisional teachers in Bibb County now earn $41,599, according to the district’s 2024 teacher salary schedule
Since provisional teachers are considered certified employees, their salaries should increase if the board approves the final new budget, school district spokesperson Stephanie Hartley said.
“I don’t think it’s any secret that our teachers are significantly underpaid, and they have sacrificed so much to teach our children and certainly they need to be compensated in that way,” board member Daryl Morton said in a committee board meeting in May.
Rowzee said many school systems are making priorities to pay teachers what they are worth.
“Especially when you have people at the board, at the higher levels and working in central offices that have come from the classrooms. They know what we’re dealing with on a daily basis,” she said. “So, they try to figure ‘Hey, if we’re compensating them, well, at least they’ll want to come to their jobs.’”
But when comparing Bibb’s administrative compensation to other similar-sized school districts, the pay disparities grow worse, Sims said.
“If you look at the teacher comparisons, one thing we’re looking at mathematically is the differences in terms of salaries,” he said at the board’s first budget work session in March. “For example, look at the state average difference in a T-Level 4 salary. It’s enough where (the difference) is $2,600, but if you go forward to administrative differences, they are significantly different.”
A Bibb County high school assistant principal earns roughly $52,000 less than one in Paulding County, just northwest of Atlanta, which ranks first in the district’s school-based administration wage comparison data.
The data also showed that Bibb County ranks the lowest in leadership pay among the following counties: Paulding, Fayette, Houston, Henry, Douglas and Chatham. All of those school districts have between 20,000 and 50,000 students, a group which Bibb falls into.
