Teacher wages often decrease in Fair­fax County, Virginia. Due to a funda­men­tal flaw in how teacher pay is struc­tured and teach­ers’ former inabil­ity to nego­ti­ate with the school board on their contracts, Fair­fax County Public Schools teach­ers often find them­selves with more stress and less buying power than they did during their previ­ous years. But it’s not entirely their admin­is­tra­tors’ fault.

Many people imme­di­ately assume that the admin­is­tra­tors and the prin­ci­pal set teacher pay, often blam­ing them for not provid­ing teach­ers with enough support — but they’re inside of the same pay system as the teach­ers. Any teacher in their first year of teach­ing in Fair­fax makes some­where between $56,000 and $64,000 in salary. A high school prin­ci­pal in their first year of the job makes $134,000, with the high­est level of pay a prin­ci­pal can currently make being at about $204,000. Loudoun and Fair­fax Coun­ties both pay their super­in­ten­dents more than $375,000 a year. The salaries may sound arbi­trary, but they’re actu­ally pretty well-orga­nized, even if the gap is a little absurd:

In Fair­fax County Public Schools and many other school districts across the coun­try, pay is deter­mined by “steps,” “grades,” and “scales.” Steps corre­spond to the amount of expe­ri­ence a worker has, and grades and scales corre­spond to differ­ent types of jobs in the county. Gener­ally, teach­ers move up a step every single year, and being promoted to a differ­ent level such as an admin­is­tra­tor or a team lead will push them to a differ­ent scale. However, the school board will often choose to avoid updat­ing employee salaries based on expe­ri­ence, in what is called a “step freeze.” This is because they’re actu­ally allowed to do so.

Virginia, where FCPS is located, is a “right-to-work” state. That means it has laws limit­ing the legal­ity of certain actions that orga­ni­za­tions repre­sent­ing work­ers can take. These orga­ni­za­tions are called unions, and they help their work­ers get better compen­sa­tion and work­ing condi­tions via better contracts, and some even provide legal protec­tion. Until May 2021, Virgin­ian govern­ment work­ers had no abil­ity to nego­ti­ate contracts with their govern­ments at all, and until March of 2023, unions in FCPS had no abil­ity to nego­ti­ate teacher salaries with the school board. And they still didn’t have that abil­ity before June, but the process to gain the abil­ity was a success. Their goal is to gain access to a process called collec­tive bargain­ing, and it’s extremely impor­tant to guar­an­tee­ing teach­ers fair pay and benefits.

But school board members, who are the lead­ers of the school district, want collec­tive bargain­ing for teach­ers: “…[In] March of 2023, the School Board approved a reso­lu­tion that allows staff to partic­i­pate in the Collec­tive Bargain­ing process, which will grant them the means to more fully partic­i­pate in the budget process,” says school board member Dr. Ricardy Ander­son. They want employ­ees to have better salaries. So why aren’t teach­ers getting paid what they deserve? Ander­son knows, and it’s because of the county: “When the county fails to provide the school divi­sion its full [budget] request, the Board is faced with the unen­vi­able task of remov­ing proposed expen­di­tures from the budget. For exam­ple, in the last fiscal year, the County provided FCPS with $20 million less than requested and that resulted in the elim­i­na­tion of a reten­tion bonus.”

Well, why doesn’t Fair­fax County give the school board the money? Because it requires rais­ing taxes. People don’t like taxes, but one of the loud­est groups lobby­ing against them is the Fair­fax County Taxpay­ers Alliance. This group believes that Iver­mectin (an anti-para­sitic drug first used on horses) cures COVID, that climate change isn’t real, and that rais­ing taxes to pay teach­ers a fair wage is an affront to the Amer­i­can Citi­zen. Even though they carry absurd view­points, they often get sympa­thy from voters, because no one likes taxes. Anyone who raises taxes is at risk of losing in the next elec­tion — and that means that, like so many other things relat­ing to basic needs and rights, it has become politi­cized.

While Fair­fax County’s school divi­sion is a massive, slow-moving orga­ni­za­tion that takes a lot of money and effort to run, that effort is human and the faculty who make it possi­ble should be compen­sated fairly, even if taxes need to be raised. Many teach­ers who live alone can’t even afford to live nearby — or even in the county they work for.

Randy Rever­comb, a teacher and Fair­fax Educa­tion Asso­ci­a­tion build­ing repre­sen­ta­tive at Justice High School, thinks it’s not work­ing out for a lot of his colleagues: “[…T]he Amer­i­can Dream used to mean that if you work really hard, even one person can achieve an ever increas­ingly better stan­dard of living, but that appar­ently does­n’t seem to be the case anymore.”

UPDATE: The Fair­fax County Board of Direc­tors recently rejected a budget proposal includ­ing a 6% raise for all FCPS employ­ees, giving them a smaller increase in total budget than the School Board requested. A 4% raise was approved in its place.

UPDATE: From June 3 to June 10, about 97% of FCPS instruc­tional staff and 81% of oper­a­tional staff voted to union­ize. This means that staff are now able to collec­tively bargain. It has been called a “land­slide” vote.