Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 39, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 September 1906 — UNDERPAID TEACHERS. [ARTICLE]

UNDERPAID TEACHERS.

Miserable Wage* Paid to the Trainer* ot American Youth. A report recently made by a committee of the Maine Pedagogical Association, appointed to ascertain the salaries paid to school teachers in that State, helps to reenforce the argument frequently made that our educators in general, and public school teachers in particular, are a wretchedly underpaid body of men and women. As a result of its investigations the committee received returns from 4.37 S teachers in elementary schools, and found that a majority of tlie women teachers were working for from $6 to $9 per week, while only 575, or about one-tenth, were paid more than $lO. It was found that half the women teachers in Maine are working for less than S2OO a year. I In comparing the pay of Maine teachers with the wages of cotton mill operatives in the State, the committee found that the balance in favor of the former was very slight. For instance, the 6,530 women working in the cotton mills of Maine get an average weekly wage of $5.99, while the women school teachers get an average weekly wage of $6.90. The men in the cotton mills of Maine get an average weekly wage of SB.OI, while the men teachers get $9.18. Since it costs a person much more to become properly equipped for the teaching profession than it does to become an efficient mill worker, to saw nothing of the higher expense of daily living for the former, the additional wage received by the teachers, according to this report, is far less than it should be.