Before the school day begins, hundreds of thousands of students across North Carolina eat school breakfast — in the cafeteria, in the classroom, from grab-and-go kiosks, and more.

In the , the most recent available data, more than 73 million school breakfasts were served to roughly 470,000 students across the state. The majority of them were provided for free.

that eating school breakfast is associated with a variety of positive outcomes for students, including improved and better .

“School breakfast offers a peace of mind to these students that do not get food at home,” said Keli McNeill, a parent in Richmond County, during a meeting ahead of . “They can come into school knowing, ‘I might be hungry right now, but in another 10 minutes, I’m not going to be hungry anymore, because I’m going to have food, and I’m going to be able to make it through my day.’ It’s about so much more than food.”

Yet traditional school breakfast approaches, which often require students to arrive before class begins and eat in the cafeteria, can limit access to these important meals.

To increase participation in school breakfast, districts across the state are implementing innovative breakfast models, including breakfast served in the classroom, grab-and-go kiosks, and second chance breakfast, often served after first period.

In 2024, then-Gov. Roy Cooper in NC Innovative School Breakfast Grants to help 42 school districts and charter schools implement innovative school breakfast models and expand student participation.

Districts are also increasingly offering free breakfast to all students under the federal (CEP), available to high-poverty schools.

Advocates in North Carolina, including the coalition, have called for school breakfast to be provided to all students at no cost. In March 2025, Gov. Josh Stein for all public school students in his state budget proposal.

Then, in April, a “” bill was introduced in the General Assembly, sponsored by four Republican House members. Although the bill did not move forward, it garnered support from both Democrats and Republicans, with more than 50 sponsors.

“If we really want to change our education system, one way is to start by giving every student a nice, nutritious start to the day,” said Tami Poland, principal of Swift Creek Elementary in Johnston County, during the School Meals for All NC meeting.

Innovative breakfast models increase participation in Mitchell County Schools

Heather Calhoun has worked in , located in the mountains of western North Carolina, for 27 years. Calhoun considers herself a big advocate for school breakfast and said she has seen the benefits that eating breakfast provides to students firsthand.

“We know hungry kids are not going to learn — they’re not going to do well on tests,” she said, adding that skipping breakfast can also lead to malnutrition and poor behavior.

Today, the roughly in Mitchell County Schools are served free breakfast and lunch through CEP. But according to Calhoun, the district offered free breakfast to all students even before CEP was in place. Soon after, participation in school meals increased as the stigma associated with identifying students by their free, reduced, or paid meals status was gone.

“That’s one of the things I think has really been great for our county and our students — making sure that they have a good breakfast every day,” she said.

The district has also implemented two innovative models to increase participation: breakfast in the classroom and second chance breakfast.

For K-8 students, a cart in the hallway allows them to pick up breakfast and eat it in their homeroom while morning announcements and other activities begin. Calhoun said these breakfast carts have been the most effective approach in increasing breakfast participation, and that students participate at much higher rates compared to serving breakfast in the cafeteria.

“If you say, ‘OK, come into the lunchroom and come through the line and get it,’ they don’t do it,” she said. “We tried that one time … and half the kids didn’t eat.”

For high school students, a second chance breakfast is provided in addition to traditional breakfast in the cafeteria. After the first class block, a cart circles around the hallways, offering a chance for students to eat who may have missed breakfast before the first bell.

“A lot of kids at the high school, they’re not going to get there 30 minutes before class, or they want to go hang out with their friends,” said Calhoun. “They don’t want to stop by the cafeteria.”

Students’ favorite breakfast items include chicken biscuits, sausage biscuits, and a cheese stick with yogurt or whole grain crackers.

Calhoun said she would like to serve more protein-rich and less grain-focused items, but that those products can often be more expensive, making it difficult to serve them within current federal reimbursement rates. For each free school breakfast served, school districts receive roughly , which has to cover the costs of food, labor, equipment, and more.

Even if an affordable item is identified, other barriers can stand in the way of sourcing new products. There may be manufacturing or procurement challenges, or the product might not be available in bulk, requiring more staff capacity to individually wrap each item before it goes on the breakfast cart.

“It’s like a Rubik’s Cube — I always say that about school nutrition,” said Calhoun. “It’s like that puzzle, where you have to fit all the pieces together.”

Free breakfast for all makes a difference at Dillard Academy

Located in Goldsboro, is a K-8 public charter school that opened in 1998 with the goal of providing more personalized instruction for local students. That’s according to Danielle Baptiste, the school’s executive director and daughter of the school’s founder, .

In addition to overseeing the day-to-day operations of Dillard Academy, Baptiste also serves as the school nutrition director, ensuring roughly have access to meals each day.

“We’re a very small school, and so you end up having to be that jack-of-all-trades,” she said.

Through CEP, all students receive free meals at Dillard Academy. When students get off of the bus, they have the opportunity to go into the cafeteria and eat, with about 60% of students participating in breakfast each morning. If students get dropped off late, breakfast service continues until 9 a.m.

“We really want to make sure that our students are fed and have that basic level of need met when they go into the classroom so they can maximize their instruction, their learning,” said Baptiste.

As a small charter school, Baptiste said being able to provide free meals to all students has provided multiple benefits. It serves as a draw for parents, who have the peace of mind that there will always been food available for their student. For the school’s small staff, it has reduced the administrative burden of providing meals, as they do not have to collect meal applications or verify eligibility for free or reduced-price meals.

“It’s super simple — every child with a lunch number gets a free lunch and a free breakfast and a free snack,” said Baptiste.

She has also seen a reduction in the stigma associated with participating in school meals, especially among older students.

“It’s not necessarily cool to eat in the cafeteria — but if they see something they really like, they can make that decision right there on the spot,” she said.

Baptiste said her mother’s decision to offer school breakfast and lunch from the very first day the charter school opened reflects a strong belief in the importance of meeting students’ basic needs.

“In education, we don’t always think about how important it is to make sure our students are well fed — and that really feeds their brain for the rest of the day,” said Baptiste.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Two ballot measures to fund Colorado’s universal school meals program, the only statewide contests in the 2025 off-year election, were approved by voters Tuesday night, according to unofficial results.

The Associated Press called the race in favor of Proposition MM, which would raise $95 million annually for school meals by limiting tax deductions for filers with higher incomes, at 8:25 p.m. With more than 1.4 million votes counted, nearly 65% of voters had cast a ballot in favor of Proposition LL, and 58% voted in favor of Proposition MM.

Both measures were by the Colorado General Assembly earlier this year. Together, they will shore up funding for Healthy School Meals For All, a state program that provides free breakfast and lunch to all students regardless of their family’s income level.

“Thank you to every voter, volunteer, community partner, and endorsing organization who turned out to pass Propositions LL and MM, ensuring every child in Colorado can continue to get a healthy meal at school,” Joe Kabourek, campaign manager for the Keep Kids Fed Colorado campaign, said in a press release. “Propositions LL and MM will keep kids fed in school, leading to better grades, higher graduation rates, and better outcomes for Colorado students.”

Colorado voters approved a to create the program three years ago. It was funded by limiting income tax deductions for filers earning over $300,000 per year. The program’s funding mechanism raised more than expected in the 2023-2024 fiscal year, but its costs also exceeded projections, resulting in a budget gap that rose to roughly $50 million this year.

Proposition LL will allow the state to keep the $12.4 million in excess 2023-2024 revenue that would otherwise be returned to voters under the 1992 state constitutional amendment known as the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.

Proposition MM aims to permanently fund the full program by further limiting tax deductions for filers earning over $300,000 a year. About 194,000 Coloradans in that high-income category would pay an average of $486 more in income taxes yearly, according to nonpartisan state fiscal analysts.

Keep Kids Fed Colorado reported $739,200 in contributions since June, mostly from the nonprofit Hunger Free Colorado. The measures were endorsed by a long list of organizations including Children’s Hospital Colorado, Great Education Colorado, Mi Familia Vota, Rocky Mountain Farmers Union and Save the Children Action Network. The measures did not draw an organized opposition campaign.

During a special legislative session in August, Colorado lawmakers to allow the additional revenue to be spent on broader efforts to reduce food insecurity, once the Healthy School Meals For All program’s costs are covered. That would help the state partially offset the impact — estimated at up to $170 million annually — of reduced funding and higher administrative costs for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, as a result of  in July.

“While we celebrate this victory for Colorado kids and families, we also cannot ignore that, for thousands of Colorado families, this remains a time of deep economic hardship and food insecurity, made worse by USDA’s refusal to provide full funding for SNAP and the devastating cuts to SNAP Congress approved this past summer,” Anya Rose, director of public policy at Hunger Free Colorado, said in a statement.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com.

WASHINGTON — During Donald Trump’s first term as president, he was reluctant to speak boldly about school choice.

That’s according to Kellyanne Conway, an aide to the president back then, and one of his former campaign managers. “He would say ‘Aren’t we the ones who say it [education] is local? Why would the president of the United States bigfoot all that?’”

Expect that reticence to be a thing of the past, Conway told the audience  devoted to promoting the benefits of school choice — from  in the style of programs in West Virginia and Arizona to charter schools and . On the campaign trail, Trump already has been vocal about his embrace of parental choice. “We want federal education dollars to follow the student, rather than propping up a bloated and radical bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.,”  at a rally in Wisconsin last month.

(To be sure, Trump did  near the end of his first term offering states the opportunity to use federal money to create school choice programs. When I looked into it a few years ago, I couldn’t find any state that had taken him up on the offer.)

Conway urged participants at the post-Election Day gathering to speak a certain way in their advocacy to lawmakers going forward. “Lead with solutions not problems. The problems can be the second part of the sentence, or maybe the second paragraph.” The panelists — including the founder of a group of charter schools for students with autism in Arizona, the leader of a private school for boys in Alabama and the head of a foundation that supports microschools — were all winners of , fueled by  and run by the Center for Education Reform.

She also urged the crowd not to make school choice about teachers unions, “which is fun to do, especially this week but it doesn’t educate another child.” (The National Education Association, the nation’s largest labor union, generally has opposed private school vouchers and has been celebrating the . “The decisive defeat of vouchers on the ballot across multiple states speaks loudly and clearly: The public knows vouchers harm students and does not want them in any form,” NEA President Becky Pringle said in a statement.) 

Lawmakers who need convincing aren’t holding out just because of union pressure, Conway said. In Texas, for instance, rural lawmakers worried about the effect of vouchers on their schools  or torpedoed plans in that state that would allow parents to use public money for private school tuition. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott helped elect enough new members in place of those rural holdouts, however, that .

The school choice event at the Ronald Reagan Building in D.C. was notable for the range of people it featured, including parents and pastors, people who are white, Black and Latino, and several Democrats, including Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and state Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams of Pennsylvania. Some of the speakers told stories about opening their own charter schools and private schools. They urged the president-elect to take action on choice, including allowing  for children in low-income families to follow those kids to private schools or other settings outside public schools.

In Congress, with Republicans taking hold of the Senate and expected to retain control of the House, lawmakers already have proposed legislation that has, until now, mostly been a nonstarter. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who is likely to become chair of the committee that oversees education in his chamber, introduced  this session that would give families and corporations tax credits if they contribute to groups that give scholarships to students to attend private or parochial schools. It would target students whose families earn no more than 300 percent of the area median gross income. Cassidy’s wife, Laura, runs a charter school for children with dyslexia in Baton Rouge.

“I think that there’s going to be a real opportunity to promote innovation in school choice,” Cassidy said. “There is great promise in this administration, and I am looking forward to working with them.”

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When Espie Chapman began teaching introductory agriculture classes at Kailua Intermediate School three years ago, the plot of land near her classroom was mostly vacant except for a small orchard of fruit trees.

Chapman had no farming experience, but she was determined to create a space where her seventh and eighth grade students could grow fresh fruits and vegetables. She asked the teens what they wanted to plant and got to work purchasing wheelbarrows and seeds for her class.

The school’s garden now produces fruits and vegetables like bok choy, spinach and papaya that Chapman’s students transform into soups and salads to sample during class.

“We just try and look at what’s in our farm, and what kind of recipes can we do with that,” Chapman said. “If they’re going to try and eat it, we’ll make it happen.”

Chapman’s class teaches teens about nutrition and sustainability, but while students are cooking the kind of locally sourced and culturally relevant lunches that the Hawaii Department of Education aspires to provide in all schools, they can’t actually serve meals in the cafeteria.

DOE previously ran a pilot program to train schools on food safety and enable them to serve produce from their gardens, but the program has been on pause since the Covid-19 pandemic. Without it, Chapman would have to figure out how to meet strict federal and state protocols on her own to supply the school’s cafeteria with produce from the garden.

DOE did not respond to questions about the status of the Garden to Cafeteria program and whether schools will be able to participate in the future.

Approximately 85% of Hawaii schools have gardens, but only a few have serious agricultural programs where students earn certifications as food handlers or gain firsthand experience harvesting and selling produce and using sustainable growing methods.

Typically teachers use school gardens for lessons ranging from the life cycle of a plant to a poetry unit focused on nature. But some want to take their lessons a step further by using produce from the gardens in school meals, exposing more kids to fresh fruits and vegetables and giving students a sense of ownership over what they’re eating.

DOE has historically struggled to increase the use of local ingredients in school lunches, and advocates say gardens can encourage students to eat healthier.

“School gardens can galvanize a community,” said Natalie McKinney, chief program officer of the Kokua Hawaii Foundation, which promotes environmental education and runs a learning farm in Haleiwa.

‘A Hidden Gem’

Third grade teacher Rex Dubiel Shanahan planted a garden at Sunset Elementary when she first started teaching in 1987 and takes pride in showing students how to plant seeds or make kimchi using the carrots they grow.

“You can teach almost everything through the garden,” Dubiel Shanahan said.

Sunset Elementary participates in the Aina In Schools program, which is run by the Kokua Hawaii Foundation and provides schools with activities that tie gardening to lessons in science and nutrition. But, Dubiel Shanahan said, she would like more schools to have access to resources on sustainability and healthy eating for students.

In recent years, DOE has offered more professional development opportunities for teachers interested in starting gardens. It has developed resources for schools to create peace gardens to support student mental health and is helping teachers incorporate more lessons about native plants into their classes, said Jennifer Ryan, the department’s school garden coordinator.

Even with more resources and professional development available, it can be daunting for teachers to maintain school gardens on their own, said Waikiki Elementary Principal Ryan Kusuda. Schools don’t have a dedicated source of funding to hire full-time garden coordinators, and many campuses rely on families and teachers when it comes to weeding, harvesting and other tasks.

Waikiki Elementary has the extra budget to pay for a sustainability teacher and a part-time farm manager dedicated to facilitating student learning and keeping up the garden, Kusuda said, adding it would be difficult to maintain the space solely through volunteers.

“It’s a hidden gem,” Kusuda said, adding that the school has roughly 80 fruit trees supplying tangerines and starfruit that students can sample during class.

In some cases, schools use gardens to help jump-start students’ careers.

In Leilehua High School’s career and technical education program, students in the natural resources pathway are responsible for 3.5 acres of land on which they grow lettuce, beets, radishes and more. CTE teacher Jackie Freitas requires her students to earn their certifications in food handling and gain experience selling produce to teachers and families every week.

“We are trying to help our community and provide them with fresh produce that they can afford and that they know is safe,” Freitas said.

Other schools have taught their students the importance of eating local by drawing on their gardens to supply produce to their cafeterias.

Last month, students at the Hawaii Academy of Arts and Science supplied 160 pounds of kalo from their garden to the cafeteria. Cooks at the Big Island charter school turned the taro into poi, which students enjoyed with their lunches of kalua pork and rice, said teacher Wendy Baker.

While the gardens don’t produce enough fruits and vegetables to supply 600 lunches every day, Baker added, occasionally incorporating food from the garden in school lunches helps students appreciate the time and effort that goes into their meals.

“When they help the garden, the garden helps them,” Baker said.

But including produce from the garden in school meals raises the stakes when it comes to requirements around food safety.

Schools already follow best practices around harvesting and preparing produce, such as requiring students to sanitize their hands and thoroughly wash their fruits and vegetables, said Debbie Millikan, a member of the Hawaii Farm to School Network and director of sustainability at Punahou School. But when it comes to growing food for school meals, campuses need to comply with additional state and federal guidelines like testing their water for E. coli every year and tracking the exact location where students harvest produce.

If students get sick from school meals, Millikan said, it’s important for schools to identify the source of the problem and know where their ingredients originate.

“Food safety and garden safety is absolutely critical, no matter whether you’re growing it at home or growing in a school garden,” Millikan said. “The record-keeping part is really critical because you’re serving a large group of students a large amount of food.”

In 2018, DOE started a Garden to Cafeteria pilot program to adopt federal regulations around food safety and apply them to schools. Participating campuses were required to document their compliance with water, soil and food safety requirements in order to incorporate fruits and vegetables from their gardens into meals.

A dozen schools participated in the three-year pilot, but frequent turnover in DOE’s food services branch put the program on pause as schools reopened during the Covid-19 pandemic, said Dennis Chase, program manager at the Hawaii Public Health Institute. Most schools, including past participants in the pilot, haven’t been able to serve food from their gardens since.

McKinney at the Kokua Hawaii Foundation said she’s hopeful DOE will revive the program. Schools are unlikely to grow at the scale they need to produce all their own food, she added, but it’s important to incorporate more local produce in school meals so students will be more receptive to trying new fruits and vegetables in the future.

Other Ways To Meet School Food Needs

Numerous schools on the mainland — and a few in Hawaii — have been able to tackle food safety issues to grow food for their lunch programs, proving that the challenge is not insurmountable.

San Diego launched a program 10 years ago to train teachers and garden coordinators on how to safely plant and harvest food for school lunches, said Janelle Manzano, the district’s farm-to-school program specialist. Before the pandemic, she added, 10 to 15 schools participated in the program, although the number dropped to five last year.

It’s been difficult for some campuses to revive their gardens after the pandemic, Manzano said, but she’s hopeful more schools will start growing their own produce in the coming year.

At Leilehua High School, Freitas was undeterred when DOE’s Garden to Cafeteria pilot ended. Last year, Freitas received a Good Agricultural Practices certification from the United States Department of Agriculture for the school’s hydroponic greenhouse. The greenhouse is subject to audits twice a year to make sure students are following safety requirements for harvesting produce and tracking their cleaning and sanitation schedules.

The certification means Leilehua’s greenhouse is held to the same standards as commercial farms and can supply produce to the cafeteria like any other vendor, Freitas said. While the garden’s safety procedures have not changed much, she added, students are now required to keep a more detailed record of when they clean their tools and harvest produce.

Freitas said her students are still working with cafeteria staff to determine how the produce can fit into the school’s meal plan, but she’s hoping the process will help them understand how they can contribute to food production in Hawaii and take pride in their work.

“It can be done,” Freitas said.

This story was originally published on Honolulu Civil Beat. 

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

“Hawaii Grown” is funded in part by grants from the Stupski Foundation, Ulupono Fund at the Hawaii Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.

COLUMBIA — Poor South Carolina students who eat meals at school for a much-reduced cost would no longer pay anything under a Senate budget proposal.

Students who aren’t considered poor enough to eat for free pay 30 cents for breakfast and 40 cents for lunch. Nearly 10,000 students statewide qualify for that rate, while 622,000 can eat for free.

The budget clause advocated by Sen. Katrina Shealy would ensure no student would need to scrounge up nickels and dimes to eat.

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That 70 cents per day for students who eat both meals at school — $3.50 a week for Monday through Friday — probably seems insignificant for most, but for the families who qualify for that rate, it can be a big deal, said Shealy, who sits on Senate Finance and is chairwoman of the Senate Family and Veterans’ Services Committee.

Her proposal, sent to the Senate floor this week as part of Senate Finance’s budget package, is expected to cost the state less than $1.5 million in a $13.2 billion spending package. The sum could actually be much less, depending on how many eligible students sign up. If participation remains the same, covering the gap may cost $530,000, Shealy said.

“We waste that much money on much less important things,” she told the SC Daily Gazette.

The Lexington Republican hopes it’s a step toward free meals for all K-12 public school students.

“The only thing I could get was a bite out of the apple,” she said. “Next year, we can work on getting free lunches for everyone.”

She pre-filed legislation in November 2022 that would do that by requiring the state to reimburse school districts any costs not covered by the federal government. The bill has never received a hearing.

Fellow Republicans, notably Education Chairman Greg Hembree, had sticker shock at the predicted cost.

Offering universal meals at K-12 schools may cost , according to a March 2023 estimate by the state’s fiscal experts. But actual costs for that could also be much lower. A guestimate cited at a last August was $50 million to $60 million. Shealy thinks it would be closer to $40 million.

Whatever the true tally, Hembree said, that would pay for a lot of meals whose families don’t need the help.

“I don’t want to do welfare for families that don’t need it,” said the Little River Republican.

However, he said he can get on board with covering the reduced-price gap.

“This is such a small contribution, I don’t have a problem with that,” Hembree told the SC Daily Gazette.

A determines students’ eligibility for free and reduced-cost meals. For example, students in a family of three — whether a single mom with two children, or two parents with one child — can eat for free if their household income is less than $32,320. If their income is between that amount and $45,991, the children pay the reduced rate of 70 cents a day.

The vast majority of South Carolina’s K-12 public schools qualify for a that covers meal costs for all students without parental paperwork. Eligibility increased last fall as the federal government lowered the threshold for qualifying. Still, not all eligible schools in the state participate.

That’s because the federal government’s reimbursements don’t cover the cost of feeding every student, Hembree said.

A clause inserted in the state budget last year — which will roll over — was designed to increase participation. It requires local school boards to either participate where eligible or pass a resolution explaining to the public why they’re not.

The clause also bars so-called lunch shaming. Schools can’t deny meals or serve alternative meals — such as a cold peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a paper bag — to students with a lunch debt. They also can’t make the student do chores or extra work in exchange for meals or deny participation in any school event or field trip.

So, even for students who accrue debt because they can’t pay, there’s little real impact, Hembree said.

“We’ve done what we can do” on preventing children from being shamed, he told senators.

But Shealy said she still worries about schools holding the money over students’ heads to keep them from joining extracurriculars or walking at graduation. Removing the cost completely would make that a non-issue for students receiving reduced-cost meals, she said.

She plans to try again next year.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com. Follow SC Daily Gazette on and .

Two new education bills have been introduced by Democrats in the Ohio House: One to ensure school meals for any students who request them, and another to increase base teacher salaries to $50,000 per year. The future of the proposed laws is uncertain with Republican supermajorities controlling both the Ohio House and Ohio Senate.

A bill introduced by state Rep. Darnell Brewer, D-Cleveland, and state Rep. Ismail Mohamed, D-Columbus, would “require public schools to provide meals and related services to students,” even beyond changes made in the latest operating budget.

“Regardless of whether a student has money to pay for a meal or owes money for earlier meals, each school district shall provide a meal to a student who requests one,” the new bill, , states.

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The bill also prohibits a requirement that a district discard a meal after it has been served “because of a student’s inability to pay for the meal or because money is owed for previously provided meals” or “publicly identify or stigmatize a student who cannot pay for a meal or who owes a meal debt.”

In 2019, a 9-year-old Ohio student’s hot lunch was taken away over a $9.75 unpaid balance, .

The bill comes after changes were made in the most recent state operating budget to provide no-cost meals to any student who qualifies for reduced-price or free meals.

After the budget was passed, advocates praised the , but said more could be done to reduce the categorization of children and the visibility of those who have meal debt.

qualified for reduced-price or free lunches for the 2022-2023 school year, according to data from the Children’s Defense Fund of Ohio, up from 46.6% the year before. Qualification is based on household income, and children are eligible at up to 185% of the federal poverty line.

Brewer and Mohamed’s bill also requires that districts direct “communications about a student’s meal debt to a parent or guardian and not to the student, except … if a student inquires about that student’s meal debt.”

Teacher pay

In a separate bill, state Rep. Joe Miller, D-Amherst, seeks to increase the base teacher salary to $50,000 per year statewide.

That would be an increase from the current base salary of $35,000 for teachers with a bachelor’s degree. Teachers with less than a bachelor’s degree would have a base salary set at $43,250, while teachers with five years of training but no master’s degree would start at $51,900 and teachers with a master’s degree or higher would start at $54,750, according to the bill, .

Ohio’s average teacher salary has remained lower than the U.S. average since 2014, according to an analysis by, which showed an 11.2% increase in Ohio salaries from fiscal year 2012 to 2021, where U.S. salaries grew by 17.9%.

A found that average weekly wagers for teachers have remained “relatively flat” since 1996, with teachers making more than 14% less in Ohio when compared with other college-educated workers.

Salaries will still be determined based on years of service under the newest House bill, including a maximum of five years active military service.

Both bills are led by Democratic sponsors, meaning the way forward will be rocky in a Republican supermajority Ohio General Assembly, especially when this particular General Assembly has had a .

The bills still need to be assigned to a committee for consideration before public comment and possible votes can take place.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

WASHINGTON — Every public school kid in the United States was eligible for free school meals during the COVID-19 pandemic, regardless of family income, thanks to the federal government.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on and .