From a recent WRAL.com report on the new teacher licensure / pay pilot plan:

And from the most recent Best NC Teacher Pay Report (abstract):

It seems all of a sudden that North Carolina needs to raise pay for beginning teachers.

That need has happened before. And we should remember how that “raise” for beginning teachers happened.

In the long session of 2014, the NC General Assembly raised salaries for teachers in certain experience brackets (especially newer teachers) that allowed them to say that an “average” salary for teachers was increased by over 7%. They called it a “historic raise.”

However, if you divided the amount of money used in these “historic” raises by the number of teachers who “received” them, it would probably amount to about $270 per teacher.

That is because that historic raise was funded in part by eliminating teachers’ longevity pay.