Home Minnesota Educator 2025 legislative agenda continues focus on pay, pensions, health care to solve educator shortage

2025 legislative agenda continues focus on pay, pensions, health care to solve educator shortage

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As a new legislative session begins, the Legislature will need to pass a budget and take up policy proposals. This session presents unique challenges because the Minnesota House is tied. As we go to print, the chamber has yet to solidify a power-sharing agreement, and between the House and Senate, there will also be at least two special elections and litigation over which party will control which body.

Regardless of where we’re from, what we look like, or what ZIP code we call home, we all worry about whether our public schools are providing a safe and successful learning environment during these difficult times. That’s why Education Minnesota’s legislative agenda focuses on ways to tackle the most significant challenge facing public schools: the educator staffing crisis.

From the statewide shortage of teachers, licensed school staff, substitutes and education support professionals to burnout among state college faculty, it’s clear that Minnesota must improve the financial well-being of its educators to address the labor crunch. Nearly nine out of 10 schools in Minnesota are significantly impacted by the educator shortage, which harms students of color, students with disabilities and students in rural areas the most.

Understaffing results in significant workload increases for the teachers that do remain. Low pay forces educators to work multiple jobs, and spiraling health insurance costs make health care increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible. All of these factors accelerate educator burnout. Add in a broken pension system, and it’s no surprise that so many educators are reluctantly leaving their students for higher wages outside of public education.

Despite all this, educators continue to work hard every day. Educators are worth more—and they know it. That’s why Education Minnesota’s 84,000 members support a package of bills designed to recruit the next generation of passionate and knowledgeable educators and retain the best group of education professionals in America.

During the 2023 legislative session, our members successfully advocated for public education advancements—including pension improvements, unemployment insurance for hourly workers, Paid Family Medical Leave for educators and compensation for READ Act training. For the 2025 session, not only will we push for continued improvements to these programs, we will also fiercely defend our victories from 2023.

We will push for continued improvements to these programs and will fiercely defend our victories from 2023.

This year we expect big changes and challenges to public education from Washington, D.C. Our union will resist any attempts to reduce revenue, divert taxpayer dollars from public schools, or cut funding on any of the hard-won advancements our members have made in the past. We will seek replacement funding for federal budget cuts, if necessary.

To offer our students the highest-quality education, employers must pay their educators fairly from day one through retirement, show them the respect they deserve and reduce burnout. Our legislative agenda features proposals that, when implemented together, present an important and achievable solution to the staffing crisis. Our students and educators have waited long enough.

Education Minnesota’s legislative agenda is created by members from across the state, reflects the priorities of our members and informs the union’s work at the Capitol.

The legislative agenda includes:

Educator pay

Minnesota teachers in E-12 schools make 28% less, on average, than other workers in Minnesota with the same education level. Wages for hourly school workers are even worse—many often only make minimum wage, and in locals that have negotiated better pay, those pay increases are eaten up by health insurance costs (for more information on this, see pgs. 9-10). It is imperative that the state of Minnesota make direct investments in the compensation of its educators. Our union supports legislation that:

• Raises wages for all teachers, commensurate with other professions with similar educational requirements, and raises starting wages to a minimum of $60,000 annually.
• Establishes a minimum wage for hourly school workers of $25 an hour and a minimum annual salary.
• Supports higher compensation for the faculty in the state’s colleges and universities, including wages and expanding the right of dependent tuition waivers to state universities.

Educator pensions

Educator pensions are not the recruitment and retention tool they were created to be. A top priority for teachers is reforming their pension plans. Compared to other states, Minnesota educators have some of the highest contributions to their own pensions. Direct state investment is required to meaningfully reform pensions. We support legislation that:

• Creates an unreduced career rule of 60 years of age and 30 years of service, rewarding decades of public service with a fair retirement benefit that will help retain mid-career educators.
• Reduces penalties and increases flexibility for educator retirement, so educators can choose when they’re ready to retire without losing a significant amount of their pension benefit.
• Removes the delay on cost-of-living adjustments for Tier 2 educators who retire before their Normal Retirement Age and immediately increases COLAs for retirees from 1.2% to 1.5%.
• Supports improving the retirement plans for higher education faculty, including better pensions and increasing the Supplemental Retirement Plan statutory maximum.

Educator health care

Health insurance costs for educators have soared in the past decade, and in many areas are rising faster than negotiated salary and wage increases. The state needs to invest in educator health plans, including creating a mandatory statewide health insurance pool for all school district employees. Many educators who leave the classroom cite health care costs as their reason for changing industries. To address the staffing crisis, Minnesota must provide affordable, reliable health insurance to these essential workers. We support legislation that creates a large pool to:

• Maximize the value of cost sharing to reduce premium increases from year to year.
• Reduce unpredictability by ensuring better coverage and maximizing bargaining power with health insurance carriers regarding coverage and benefits.
• Lessen the administrative burden at the local level and remove unnecessary and costly broker fees.

Our top priority is ending the educator shortage by improving pay, pensions and health care for all school workers. Another important component of ending the staffing shortage is reducing burnout. We can do this by implementing the following:

• Ensuring educators are mentally and physically safe at work.
• Fully staffing mental and physical health teams by hiring more licensed school counselors, social workers, psychologists, nurses and other support professionals.
• Reducing class sizes and improving educator-to- student ratios in public schools and reducing special education teacher caseloads so that our students can benefit from one-on-one support.
• Offering paid student teaching to all teacher candidates, expanding registered teacher apprenticeship programs and reducing educator student debt.
• Supporting the freedom to teach an honest history of the United States and to make available age-appropriate, thought-provoking books in school libraries to counter the national movement to whitewash history, ban books and restrict our students’ freedom to read.
• Providing all students with access to professional media specialists who can teach the differences between reliable information and the misinformation and disinformation flooding social media.
• Ensuring all educators have proper time in their duty day and proper compensation to meet READ Act requirements.
• Increasing duty-free preparation time for effective lessons for all teachers.
• Providing dedicated due process time to special education teachers to meet students’ needs and to hold meetings with students’ families and manage caseload sizes.
• Fully funding services for all members of the school community, including E-12 students in special education and English language learners.
• Increasing the per-pupil funding formula to compensate for past underfunding and historic inflation.
• Funding a total of 18 hours of paid training for all paraprofessionals who work directly with students.
• Supporting specific policies to retain and attract educators of color and work towards creating school climates that reflect the diversity of Minnesota.
• Increasing access to college by renewing the state of Minnesota’s commitment to public higher education by returning to statutory levels of funding for state colleges and universities.
• Support students with behavioral challenges and disrupted learning in a fair and equitable manner.
• Creating a universal childcare and early learning program, using mixed delivery, where low-income families pay nothing and no family pays more than 7% of family income.

Ways to advocate for public education this legislative session

With close margins in the House and Senate, it is vitally important that elected officials hear from educators about the issues that are important to them. Educators are the most effective advocates for public schools!

Whether you have five minutes or five hours, there are plenty of ways to engage with your elected officials this legislative session:

Read the Capitol Connection newsletter

Capitol Connection, a weekly newsletter sent during the legislative session, keeps members up to date on what’s happening at the Legislature. Capitol Connection summarizes each week’s education-related legislative activity and provides information about upcoming proposals and issues. Capitol Connection also provides members with information about hearings and activities that members can get involved with at the Legislature. If you are a member and you are not receiving Capitol Connection during session, please contact webmaster@edmn.org and put Capitol Connection in the subject line.

Attend rallies and take actions

Throughout the legislative session, Education Minnesota and ally organizations will plan rallies to mobilize members on important education policies. We also keep the advocacy section of the website up to date with ways to contact your elected officialsabout education policies. Attend a rally, sign a petition, send emails or make phone calls to lawmakers about the issues that are important to you. Follow our social media pages and check out the “Take Action” section of our website to learn more about ways you can get involved: educationminnesota.org/advocacy/ at-the-legislature/#take-action.

Talk with lawmakers at a lobby day

As educators, we know the importance of building relationships, and lobby days provide the perfect opportunity to build relationships with your lawmakers. Grab some members of your local and schedule a lobby day to share your stories and talk with your elected officials about the issues that are most important to your students, school and community. Lobby days can be scheduled through union or IO leadership and Education Minnesota staff.

Attend an in-district meeting

Legislators often schedule constituent meetings in their districts. Check out their schedule and attend a district meeting, if they have one scheduled. You can also invite them to visit your district, school or classroom so that they can see and hear firsthand what is happening in our public schools. The more we can make our experiences and stories real to them, the more likely lawmakers are to prioritize public education issues. You can reach out to your Education Minnesota field staff if you want to schedule a formal meeting with your elected officials.

Advocate for your students and colleagues by testifying at a hearing

Proposed legislation is thoroughly discussed in committee hearings before it makes its way to the House or Senate floor. Committees also provide time during hearings to seek public input on bills, which gives educators an opportunity to share their story and how proposed bills will impact their communities and classrooms. If you are interested in testifying on a proposed piece of legislation, reach out to our lobby team at lobbyteam@edmn.org. Unsure of what to say? No problem! Lobby team staff will work with you and help you prepare remarks.

Our union’s biggest strength is that we have the power to raise our voices collectively and push for change. When each one of us gets involved in advocacy for our students, colleagues and communities, we can push major changes to pay, pensions and health care and create the public schools our students deserve.