By Caroline Mauldin, special to Charleston Currents  |  South Carolina’s public school teachers are indeed stewards of our future.  By fostering young minds to be critical and creative thinkers, they are preparing an agile workforce that will be able to adjust and thrive in a changing economy.  By showing up every day for our children, they are pillars of every community in the state, especially those that are increasingly under-resourced and struggling to survive.  And by choosing a career of service and leadership, they are doing more to ensure the state’s prosperity than most—and certainly more than we give them credit for.

South Carolina can and should be proud of our public school educators.  We should also be proud of how we celebrate them at the Teacher of the Year gala every May.  What we need to work on is how we, as a society, treat them the rest of the year.

A recent study shows that teacher salaries have actually declined in past decades as cost of living has increased.  In South Carolina, we’ve seen a 6 percent decrease since 2000, whereas salaries for other college graduates are increasing.