With just months until they have to meet a July 1 deadline to raise teacher salaries to a $60,000 minimum, only about half of Maryland’s 24 school districts have reached the threshold and the rest are scrambling to get there, education officials said Monday.
“We got questions from the LEA [local education agencies] like, ‘Is there a waiver process? How could we get an exception?’” said Rachel Hise, executive director of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future Accountability and Implementation Board. “And the answer was, ‘No, there isn’t a waiver process. This is a statutory requirement by July 1 of 2026.”
Hise said local school officials are still working on their fiscal 2027 budgets and negotiations with their teacher unions…