Florida is the number one tourist destination in the US. It is ranked first in miles of pristine coastline [in the contiguous USA—Alaska otherwise holds the number one spot which is hardly fair]. There are more freshwater springs, oranges, and golf courses here than in any other US state. And when it comes to public school teacher pay, Florida ranks 50th.
To be fair, the National Education Association, or NEA, included Washington D.C. in their assessment, so the state isn’t dead last in 50th place: that honor goes to West Virginia. What color is the ribbon for 51st place?
Meanwhile, the inflation rate was higher in Florida than any other state according to Moody’s. In 2023, Florida surpassed New York to become the state with the second most valuable housing market. The housing market in the state that gained the most value since 2020? Tampa with an increase of nearly 90%.
Hillsborough County Public Schools
Hillsborough County, located in west-central Florida and home of Tampa Bay, is the state’s most populous county outside of the Miami area. This is where the Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS) school district is found. Nearly a quarter of a million students are a part of HCPS making it the 7th largest school district in the country. HCPS claims they are the largest employer in the county with 24,000 employees (though Publix—Florida’s favorite grocery store—and a few others would probably contest that). Employees of the school district include teachers, bus drivers, administrators, mechanics, and a single welder, whose name is Hernandez.
Thanks to Florida’s “Sunshine Law,” all government records, including salary information, is public record. This includes the roughly 24,000 employees of HCPS. Of note: this data does not include private schools or any charter schools (though the latter are themselves actually public schools). Most employees of the school district are on a salary schedule so two kindergarten teachers who started teaching together 10 years ago will have the same salary, higher than a first year teacher with the same position.
This is an exploration into the the many many teachers, instructional, and non-instructional staff that keep the schools going. All of the salary information is from 2023 (which really isn’t outdated, unfortunately).
Principals
There are approximately 216 public schools (again, not including public charter) in Hillsborough County and every school has a Principal at the top and usually one or more Assistant Principals underneath them.
For those Assistant Principals (APs) who manage to get the promotion to Principal, their salary really reflects the change. The 25th percentile of APs is lower than the salary of many (perhaps few? More below…) teachers while the upper range of pay for Principals is double that number. With great power comes responsibility…and apparently a good deal more money.
Interestingly, High School Principals tend to make more money than Elementary or Middle School Principals. Perhaps they tend to stay on longer in the position (or these High School Principals could have spent time earlier in their career in lower grades). Regardless, if you can remain in a Principal position, you have a bright outlook for salary potential compared to most other positions. The box plot below shows the distribution of all Principals and APs from the above chart. The top 5 earners are High School Principals (and all men, more on that below).
Though Principals are at the top of the pay scale for “instructional”-adjacent positions (rather, those who would typically be found AT the school in which they work), the highest salaries go to various GMs, Executives, Directors, and of course at the top, is the Superintendent himself (who, for this data set in 2023, was the at-times-controversial, now former superintendent, Addison Davis).
The above chart has all Principal & AP positions filtered out which leaves about 100 HCPS employees making six figures or more. Each row is a single position for a single person (click the arrow on the chart to view more).
Who is at the opposite end of this salary spectrum?
Non-Instructional Support Staff
We will get to the teachers in a moment, but most schools could not run without the help of the “non-instructional” staff, who probably provide plenty of instruction in reality. There are a lot of these employees. Here are a few:
Paraprofessionals, also known as Paras, serve frequently as “teaching assistants” under teachers. (In Hillsborough County, 95%+ of these are ESE Paras—”exceptional students” a.k.a. children with disabilities.) Though some Paras may have an Associate’s Degree, there is no degree requirement for these positions. The same goes for the above positions in orange that keep schools running every day.
Unsurprisingly, the salary for these non-degree positions is the lowest of all HCPS positions.
Employees who have hourly positions at schools tend to suffer during periods like Summer Break, where teachers, for example, are able to take advantage of distributing their salary over an equal number of pay checks every year to insure paychecks mid-July. Which brings us to…
Teachers
The starting salary for a HCPS teacher who spent four years getting a Bachelor’s Degree, five months working for free as an unpaid intern (technically, college students pay to work since the semester is normally part of tuition), and an innumerable amount of time outside their work day planning, taking unpaid required classes and trainings for certifications, etc. is $48,000 in 2024. In 2023, it was $47,500. It’s probably not necessary to do the math to realize that a $500 increase doesn’t come close to matching the rising cost of inflation (okay it’s a 1.05% increase in salary). In 2022, the starting salary was also $47,500. In 2021, the starting salary was $47,500.
This salary may be correlated to the approximately 5,000 teacher positions that are unfulfilled in Florida.
Since the data provided by the State of Florida lists the positions of teachers, you can actually see which teachers tend to make more money.
There are many jokes about Driver Ed teachers making more than high school Physics teachers to be made, but in reality, the teachers who teach Driver Ed just tend to either not leave their jobs or are former Physics teachers that moved to a new, lower stress subject. I tend to think it’s the first option. There are only 29 Driver Ed teachers in the county so there aren’t a lot of positions to fill.
It might be worthwhile to remind the reader of the meaning of the median: When you order all of the salaries from low-to-high, the median is the wage right in the middle of that list (or the average of the middle two if it’s an even number). Considering the starting salary for 2023 was $47,500, a median of $51,000 suggests that younger, newer teachers might not be staying put in their positions and are replaced more often.
As for how many actual teachers there are for some of these electives like Driver Ed and more, here is the breakdown.
As a comparison, below is an unfiltered chart of the top 100 jobs in HCPS by count. Keep in mind that this list may be slightly verbose as every position is accounted for (ex. Secretary 1 is separate from Secretary 2, presumably a promotion).
All Salaries
The final chart below shows the average salary for every HCPS position that has more than 20 employees with the position. You can search and sort the table.
If the starting teacher salary in 2021 of $47,500 had kept up with inflation, the starting salary in 2024 would have been $54,600. Unfortunately for public school teachers, registered nurses, bus drivers, etc., this makes these jobs in Hillsborough County a very unattractive offer. And more unfortunately, students across Hillsborough County are the ones that are ultimately paying for the state being 50th in the Nation.
Bonus: Mr. or Ms.?
Anyone that has spent a lot of time in an elementary school has probably noticed that there are typically a lot more women teachers than men teachers there. This certainly seems to be the case in Hillsborough County according to the numbers.
Just for fun (as this always is), I used a “gender guesser” in Python that takes a first name and gives you the best guess as to whether it’s a male, female, or unknown. I split the unknown into the same ratio as the known, added them up, and came up with the below data. It’s not exactly scientific and probably has a little error, but these numbers are probably in the ball park. I feel pretty confident even in the extremes (yes, there appear to be no women “Mechanics” in HCPS based on their names).