Utah teachers paid more than neighboring states

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Jon M. Huntsman School of Business

Some Utah school districts, including Canyons School District, are attracting teaching talent from across the country.

Canyons is one of eight Utah school districts now paying first-year teachers at least $60,000 a year. Several other Utah school districts are offering salaries just below that high-water mark.

According to Envision Utah, a private, nonprofit regional planning entity, the other districts paying beginning teachers more than $60,000 this school year are Park City, Logan, Wasatch, South Summit, Tooele, Murray and Ogden.

Given record spending for public education by the Utah Legislature in recent years and local efforts by school districts to support educators who shouldered heavy burdens during and emerging from the pandemic, it is not wholly surprising Utah teacher salaries have increased significantly.

Salaries paid to Utah educators now outstrip their peers in neighboring states, including Colorado and Idaho, most of which start in the $40,000 to $50,000 range.

And according to Jason Brown, Envision Utah’s vice president of education and communication, raising teacher salaries in Utah helps the profession compete for talent with industries that have traditionally paid better.

Are big families starting to make a comeback?

Ask American adults what they think makes the perfect family size and 45% believe having at least three children is ideal, according to a new Gallup Social Series survey.

That’s the highest share supporting large families since 1971 and a big jump from the 38% who said that in 2013, which was itself a jump from 33% in 2003.

While Americans are pretty evenly divided on whether big families or small families are better, the preference for larger families has been trending up, while the preference for small families has dropped some.

The national polling company started measuring family size preference in 1936 — a year when three children was considered ideal by nearly two-thirds of families. A larger family preference “peaked at 77% in 1945, at the end of World War II and just before the baby boom,” the Gallup report said.

The report suggested that the precipitous drop in desire for large families between 70% in 1967 to 52% in 1971 might be attributed to the arrival of contraceptive pills, the wave of women entering the labor force and Paul Erlich’s bestseller, “The Population Bomb.”

Read more about how the health of the economy affects the birthrate.

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