By Amy Cockerham

Public Ed Works

SYLVA (May 14, 2025) – North Carolina school district leaders on the state line are being forced to come up with creative methods to hire teachers as they grapple with the effects of low pay.

The latest report released by the National Education Association found that average teacher pay in the state ranks 43rd in the nation.

Dr. Dana Ayers is the Superintendent of Jackson County Public Schools in southwest North Carolina. The district loses teachers every year to the neighboring states of Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee.

“Going to a neighboring state or a neighboring district that pays more, that is the number-one reason that people leave, to be honest,” Ayers said.

“People who know, ‘I can drive 30, 45 minutes further to make 10, 12, $15,000 more a year,’ they do that. We are losing quality people because of the pay.”

Jackson County is home to Western Carolina University, a university known for producing educators. But Ayers said recruiting still isn’t easy.

“It’s not the fault of the university by any means,” Ayers said. “I think in general that the education profession is not as respected as it was.”

Ayers said finding affordable housing is a struggle for teachers that want to move to her district.

ON THE OTHER side of the state, the challenge is just the same.

Dr. Keith Parker is the Superintendent of Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Public Schools. He said the county has a hard time hiring recent college graduates, often due to lack of affordable housing.

“Those graduates look at urban areas, and there’s easier access to find housing there,” Parker said. “There’s just more apartments, and so sometimes we lose people across the state line into some urban areas.”

Parker said to fill teaching positions, his schools have had to use new methods.

“One of those is a program we have right now in partnership with Elizabeth City State University where we have some grant funding that is allowing us to take our teacher assistants, some of them who do not have four-year bachelor’s degrees in teaching, we are getting them a fully funded bachelor’s degree in teaching through a partnership,” Parker said.

This comes with a two-to-three-year obligation to repay the degree through working for the district, he said.

“They’ve already had years of experience working with children in the teacher assistant role,” Parker said. “They’re going to take that, get the degree, and they’re going to be amazing teachers when they go into the profession.”

Not far away in Currituck County Schools, Superintendent Dr. Matt Lutz said the job application process looks much different than it did years ago. Now, the Currituck schools respond quickly to applicants and even invite them to visit their schools.

Lutz said retired Virginia teachers are a candidate pool they try to tap into.

“We are actively seeking retirees from Virginia to come across so they draw their retirement from there,” Lutz said.

However, the state of North Carolina is losing teachers that way too. Once retired, a teacher may cross over to Virginia to make more money while they continue working.

Lutz said in recent years, the district had to start hiring more nontraditional, unlicensed teachers.

“Five years ago we might have had two teachers on a nontraditional license track, and now we have over 20,” Lutz said. “So that’s been a huge shift in that we have nontraditional teachers filling core subjects.”

Lutz said it might only take a teacher 25 minutes to drive from his district across the state line. In the Hampton Roads area, they can see quite a pay difference.

“If you are a new teacher coming out, you could make $17,000 more coming out of school versus what the state of North Carolina along with our local supplement offers you,” Lutz said.

In hopes of changing this, Lutz is working with county leaders to increase Currituck County’s local pay supplement for teachers.

“We’ve asked for a $3,000 local supplement increase,” Lutz said. “They have yet to decide how much they’re going to be able to give, but currently we’re 73rd in the state out of 115 districts.”

Lutz said even that’s not going to cut it if state leaders don’t also take action.

“Very important at the state and local level that we embrace our teachers as they are the foundation of our future,” Lutz said. “Helping our kids learn to read, write, add and become good citizens.”

This is the second of a two-part series diving deeper into the effect low teacher pay is having on school districts across the state. For previous work, click here.