CHAPTER 725
An Act to require the Department of Education to convene a stakeholder work group to consider definitions for and calculations of competitive public elementary and secondary school teacher compensation; report.
[S 1215]
Approved March 27, 2023
Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia:
1. § 1. The Department of Education (the Department) shall convene a work group no later than August 15, 2023, consisting of school board representatives, division superintendents, public elementary and secondary school teachers, parents of public elementary and secondary school students, representatives of major associations representing public elementary and secondary school staff, and such other stakeholders as the Department deems appropriate to consider and make recommendations in the form of a publicly available report posted on the Department website and addressed and sent to the Chairmen of the House Committee on Education and the Senate Committee on Education and Health no later than November 1, 2023, on the appropriateness, feasibility, potential fiscal impact, and potential unintended consequences of (i) preserving the definition of the term "competitive" contained in § 22.1-289.1 of the Code of Virginia, as applied to the compensation of public elementary and secondary school teachers; (ii) amending such definition to incorporate an alternative metric, including the median annual salary of a Virginia worker who is 25 years of age or older and has a bachelor's degree; and (iii) requiring the Department or another entity to conduct an annual calculation to determine public school teacher compensation and the commensurate flat percentage increase to the state share of salary funding for Standards of Quality-supported positions that is necessary to make such compensation competitive under any such definition.