“Nobody goes into education to become rich, but we deserve what was guaranteed to us,” Cindy Sexton, president of the Teacher’s Association of Baltimore County (TABCO), told Truthout. After months of renegotiations regarding a pay-raise deal for teachers for the 2025-2026 school year, in mid-July, both TABCO and the school district reached an agreement that grants teachers less than they’d bargained for.
The initial pay raise deal was part of a three-year negotiated agreement with the Baltimore County school system last year, which would have increased teachers’ compensation by 14 percent by the 2026-2027 school year. Educators called it a monumental move that not only saved teachers unions from the bargaining table but also ensured incremental pay increases that would be accounted for in each year’s budget. “Negotiations are hugely time-consuming, and we wanted a new system where we could all count on our pay and they could focus on the budget it was going to cost them — it was widely touted and celebrated,” Sexton said.
And while year one of this deal proved successful, by November 2024, both federal and state funding cuts prompted the Baltimore County school district to ask unions back to the negotiating table, despite their raises already having been approved just the year before.
“The initial agreement was halted despite the district already negotiating with the county executive according to our contract,” Sexton said. “While we still met with the district about non-monetary things that they could do to help our workload, there was no movement. In February of this year, Baltimore County Executive [Kathy] Klausmeier finally told the district how much money they could count on, and it was far less than what they needed to fund this agreement.”
In fact, despite Baltimore County Public Schools (BCPS) requesting a 10.4 percent increase to their overall budget for the 2025-2026 school year, Klausmeier’s finalized budget in April only accounted for a 3.5 percent increase, leaving a gap of $61 million for the teacher’s raises. Now, the 5 percent teacher’s pay raise anticipated in the last year was being renegotiated to as low as 1.5 percent. “This is the first time that any of us can remember [that] the school system has not gotten the funding it needed from the county executive,” Sexton told Truthout.
And despite TABCO and other teachers’ unions recognizing the three-year agreement as a fixed contract, Sexton says she believes the school district relied on flexible language in the agreement which outlined that renegotiations would happen in the case of underfunding to re-budget the pay raise deal whenever they saw fit. “It just does not appear that [the agreement] was bargained in good faith,” she said. “It appears like [BCPS] knew from the beginning that they were going to go back to the language that said, ‘If the funding doesn’t happen you renegotiate.’ They put forward a budget that they knew was not going to be funded.”
Since then, TABCO has expanded its fight, organizing demonstrations and campaigns that garnered historic teacher turnout. “We started with letter-writing campaigns to the board of ed, the county council, the county executive — we picketed in the rain,” Sexton told Truthout. “We even canvassed in Kathy Klausmeier’s home district — to her voters — [as a reminder] of her promise.”
Schools across the county even engaged in their own protests, and some organized a “work-to” rule where teachers would walk out of their classroom outside of work hours — an act that led to an all-member vote through TABCO and encouraged hundreds of other educators to participate. “Teachers give so many extra hours of time,” Sexton clarified, “so this was about just respecting that time.”
On June 10, teachers rallied at the school board in historic numbers, weeks after Superintendent Myriam Rogers revised the initial 1.5 percent pay raise to 2.5 percent and refused to budge. “The organizing started around anger, really, because our promise wasn’t honored,” Sexton told Truthout. In June, she told local media, “We [maintained] that in a $2 billion budget, there is money for the educators.”
Teachers’ organizing, as well as the work of TABCO’s renegotiation team, culminated in a tentative agreement reached between the union and the district on July 16, and finalized on July 23. According to Sexton, the new raise agreement consists of a cost-of-living adjustment of 1 percent effective on September 20, and then an official pay raise starting on January 6. “So instead of seeing 5 percent for the whole entire fiscal year, we’ll see 3.05 percent because we’re missing out on several months of that increase,” Sexton told Truthout. According to a TABCO press release, the finalized agreement represents a cash value of $26 million, compared to the $9 million package offered to TABCO in May. Despite this finalized renegotiation representing nearly double the 1.5 percent offered in May, Sexton stresses that it’s far from an achievement for them. “It’s still not a win because we didn’t get what we had signed and agreed to,” Sexton told Truthout. “It’s certainly better than we would have done, but I don’t want anybody to think that we’re content.”
A Sign of the Times
With next year’s pay raise threatened by underfunding, Sexton’s first worry is teacher retention throughout the Baltimore County Public School system. “Baltimore County loses approximately 10 percent of its educators every year,” according to Sexton, with most new teachers resigning after short periods of teaching. But this trend is representative of a greater issue in education throughout the country. “There’s a national educator shortage. We know that. It’s not just Maryland — it’s not just Baltimore County.”
Neglected pay raise deals like that in Baltimore County are one of the reasons teachers fail to stay in their positions. According to a study conducted by the National Education Association, low pay and poor working conditions keep quality educators from being attracted to — and retained in — the profession. In fact, despite a 4.4 percent increase in teacher’s starting salary — representing the most significant increase over the last 15 years — teachers’ real salary growth adjusted for inflation is only 1.5 percent. This means that teachers are actually making 5 percent less than they did 10 years ago.
“When labor is scarce, compensation must increase,” writes former teacher and education advocate Michael Andoscia. Instead, teachers make less than other college graduates on average, forcing most educators to search for more profitable careers in other fields. “It’s humiliating begging for money and for fair wages, especially when other professions requiring similar skills are more lucrative,” said Carol Frigo, an elementary school teacher with Baltimore County Public Schools. “Young teachers, especially, are realizing they have skills they can take out into the workforce and make a lot more money than doing this job.”
“If we can constantly curriculum and use money for so many other things, then we can support our teachers,” said BCPS teacher Gina McDonald. “I’m sure there’s money to be found.”
According to Sexton, however, even when there is enough money from the school system, educators are typically the last to be prioritized. “The Board of Education approves millions of dollars in contracts — for the curriculum, for new HVAC systems, and other operating costs,” she told Truthout. “Every other contract the school system had was treated as a fixed cost — but not the contract for the employees?”
Most of the time, teachers also find themselves scrounging together their own finances to provide for their own students. “There are a lot of extra supplies that students need that aren’t covered by the basics that Title I covers,” one BCPS special ed teacher, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation, told Truthout. “Things to make the classroom feel inviting for students, from fidgets and toys, to snacks, stickers … I bought sensory fabric for students. Some teachers have even had to purchase new supplies when the district can’t afford to fix different things. And that’s money coming out of our own pockets.”
As a special educator, she said she finds that her students’ needs are often neglected when it comes to the school budget. “There are far too many stories of administrators prioritizing things like technology for the general-ed students, and that’s where the money goes — it’s not spent on us,” she said.
Moreover, with teachers making less than they did just 10 years ago, they simply aren’t making enough to cover the heightened cost of living and inflation. A study conducted by the Learning Policy Institute found that during the school year, 17.1 percent of U.S. teachers will take on a second job, while 49 percent will take up jobs during the summer break. Meanwhile, a poll organized by the Maryland State Education Association (TABCO’s parent organization) found that 44 percent of Maryland educators alone hold at least one additional job — and for Black and Brown Maryland educators, these figures jump to 50 percent.
The second jobs that these educators undertake don’t include the various roles educators take up for their students alone. On average, U.S. teachers work 53 hours a week, assuming multiple responsibilities like helping students outside of the classroom, performing non-teaching tasks like lunch duty or supervising extra-curricular activities, and covering other teachers’ classrooms. “It is not a job you walk away from at 5 p.m.,” one elementary school teacher told Pew Research.
The BCPS special education teacher who spoke with Truthout echoed this view. “Teachers are doing so much labor with students,” she said. “We’re doing the emotional labor and regulation with them, we’re counseling them, we’re practically parenting them and are still expected to organize rigorous instruction with them.”
And since the pandemic, teachers have fewer resources to manage the physical and mental health concerns of themselves and students, learning challenges in the classroom, and an ever-growing workload. “The number of students who come in with trauma has skyrocketed, but the resources haven’t matched the need,” one high school teacher told Pew Research. And just as teachers struggle to make ends meet in a country that withholds resources from them, poverty remains a major problem affecting students when those resources are withheld, with academic underperformance and behavioral issues being most pervasive in high-poverty schools.
Cyclically, a factor that further impairs student learning is high teacher turnover — a figure that shows no signs of slowing considering how overworked, underpaid, and undervalued educators feel. “Educators will never make what they should for the job they do,” Sexton told Truthout. “And teaching is a craft you develop over years, so we need [teachers] to come and stay — our students need it and deserve it,” she adds.
As Sexton completes her term as TABCO president, she hopes that the Baltimore County School System, the county government, and TABCO can continue to collaborate authentically, and with the intention of prioritizing educators and thus the students they teach, especially as the district and TABCO work through the 2026-2027 school year budget in accordance with their initial pay-raise deal. “That’s the next fight that we have coming — is to hold them to that as well,” she told Truthout.
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