Today is back-to-school day for Hawaii’s public school students, and a good day to spare a kind thought for Hawaii’s public school teachers.

Students and teachers alike may well be starting out the school year with high hopes, after weathering an international pandemic and its impact on the education community’s collective well-being. The hope is that educators will be able to help students catch up, if needed, and thrive — that school can be a healthy and secure place to concentrate on learning.

State investments in teacher pay and retention will help in that regard, though Hawaii’s Department of Education (DOE) and state lawmakers must remain focused on bringing the state’s funding for schools, and particularly, the teachers who power them, up to a higher standard.

A Hawaii teacher earned an average of $65,409 in 2020-21, according to the National Education Association. While that was ever-so-slightly above the national average of $65,090, Hawaii’s high cost of living diminishes buying power. That burden on teachers’ quality of life is a major factor in the teacher shortage that plagues Hawaii. For the long-term health of our public schools, teachers must be paid more.

In 2019, WalletHub named Hawaii the state with the lowest pay, adjusted for cost of living, and “worst conditions” for public school teachers. Teachers, meanwhile, were campaigning through their union, the Hawaii State Teachers Association (HSTA), to improve compensation along with the quality of classroom education, declaring the teacher shortage a “crisis.”

Keeping experienced teachers on the job is a key part of reducing the teacher shortage and ensuring education quality, especially in an era when school districts nationwide are recruiting. In Hawaii, however, the retention rate of Hawaii public school teachers after five years of employment has stubbornly hovered at just over 50% since 2016-2017, when it was 52%.

In December 2019, the state Board of Education took what then-HSTA President Corey Rosenlee called a “bold step”: raising teacher pay by $3,000 to $8,000 for as many as 7,000 educators employed in hard-to-staff schools. That $46 million salary adjustment benefited more than half of the teacher workforce, which is approximately 13,700. A differential for special education ($10,000) and language immersion teachers ($8,000) also was instituted.

The improvement produced results. DOE numbers showed that in October 2019, before the incentive was implemented, almost 30% of Hawaii’s special education positions were vacant or staffed by teachers without the necessary licenses. Two years later, that number had dropped by half, to about 15%.

The DOE began working on another piece of teachers’ compensation, salary compression, in January 2020, to address a flaw in the state’s pay-raise schedule that “trapped” teachers at a lower rung if they worked through recession years, when the state did not grant any raises.

This year, legislators funded a $130 million “experimental modernization project” that improves the pay of an estimated 8,700 teachers who were “compressed” in the middle of the salary scale. They will receive from $7,700 to $26,000, depending on years worked.

The state also continued to fund pay differentials, at an annual cost of $34.5 million. But these budget increases have not been baked into the state’s annual spending plans, leaving the improvements at risk of being rescinded with each budget year.

Hawaii needs to do better. If the DOE and legislators who control its budget continue to focus on improving conditions in the classroom for students and teachers alike, it’s possible to foresee a day when more of Hawaii’s front-line educators will truly look forward to the first day of school.