Senate education chair calls the measure ‘monumental’
Posted: May 1, 2026
On the eve of Teacher Appreciation Week, state lawmakers on Friday showed their appreciation for educators by advancing a bill to fund annual step salary increases for public and charter school teachers. The measure passed a joint House-Senate conference committee Friday afternoon, paving the way for final Senate and House votes as this year’s legislative session winds down.
If both houses approve the bill next week and the governor signs it into law, that paves the way for educators to receive an annual step increase (worth about a 3% raise), something that had to be negotiated at the bargaining table previously.
The Hawaiʻi State Teachers Association is deeply grateful to conference committee chairs Sen. Brandon Elefante and Rep. Justin Woodson, as well as conference co-chairs Sen. Donna Mercado Kim and Rep. Jackson Sayama, for shepherding the proposal through the conference process. In the conference committee, House and Senate leaders work out the differences among their bills and get them ready for final votes in both houses.
Before the conference committee vote Friday, Elefante said, “Thank you for your hard work and to the committee and to your vice chair and members for getting us to this point and all the advocates, especially HSTA, for that. This is very valuable and very impactful for our hard-working teachers.” Elefante chairs the Senate’s Labor and Technology Committee.
Kim, who also chairs the Senate Education Committee, told colleagues before the conference committee vote, “I think this is monumental. I think this bill validates the value we have in our teachers to state that, you know, they deserve to get these step increases. It’s been part of their contract for over a decade. And so finally, we can validate that.”
Annual step increases are the norm in most school districts across the nation and are already written into HSTA’s contract, but have just never been funded.
Woodson, who also chairs the House Education Committee, said, “This [automatic step increases] is definitely a national best practice, and we’re so ecstatic to get to this point. And I want to give a special mahalo to Jason Bradshaw with HSTA (who is the union’s government relations specialist). He was the conduit that made sure that everyone stayed together. So we greatly appreciate him on this.”
HSTA would also like to say mahalo to the other Senate conferees: Sens. Michelle Kidani and Rachele Lamasao; and thanks to the other House conferees: Reps. Mike Lee, Trish La Chica, Ikaika Olds and Kanani Souza.
Kim, the Senate Education Committee chair, recently expressed support for automatic step pay increases in a talk story session with Hawaiʻi State Teachers Association President Osa Tui, Jr.
An in-depth, independent study of Hawaiʻi’s teacher compensation system, completed last fall, recommended that the employer consider funding automatic step increases for teachers.
HSTA’s salary calculator allows educators to enter their step and class to see their pay rates for this school year, when most Bargaining Unit 05 members received a step increase valued at 3% (except for those who moved from 14A to 14B this year, who received a step valued at 6%). The calculator will also calculate pay rates for next school year, when all teachers will receive an across-the-board pay hike of 3.5%.
Need to find your class and step? Toward the end of every school year, HIDOE sends a link to each teacher’s HIDOE email address containing their personnel action form (Form 5) for the next school year, along with all their previous Form 5s for reference. The link does not expire.
HSTA’s new salary loss calculator allows our members to see how much money they would lose over a 25-year career without guaranteed annual step pay increases, which is the norm in the vast majority of other school districts across the country.