More money could be headed to Missouri’s public schools and teachers

More money could be headed to Missouri’s public schools and teachers. 

A Missouri Senate committee is considering Moberly State Representative Ed Lewis’s bill, which would recreate a teacher recruitment and retention scholarship fund.

Lewis told Newstalk KZRG:   “The Urban Flight and Rural Needs Scholarship Program is one that is aimed to help fill the need in hard-to-staff schools and hard-to-staff areas,” says Lewis. “It will pay a full tuition scholarship for anyone who has an Associate’s degree or has a bachelor’s degree and they want to go back and get their teaching certificate and take up to two years.”

The public education package would also boost the minimum teacher salary to 38-thousand-dollars annually. 

For teachers with a master’s degree and 10 years of experience, the minimum pay would be 46-thousand-dollars. 

Another piece of the bill would change the funding calculation for state aid to schools from the current five-percent maximum annual increase to nine-percent over the next nine years.