Educators Statewide Urge Budget Leaders to Provide a More Equitable Retirement for Commonwealth’s Longest-Serving Teachers (June 20, 2025)
Educators and labor leaders from 219 local unions across the state are urging members of the Fiscal Year 2026 budget conference committee to include important language regarding educator retirement options in the final version of the FY26 budget.
For decades, the American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts and member locals, including the Boston Teachers Union, have helped members navigate their complex benefits systems, including the Massachusetts Teachers Alternative Retirement Plan (or Retirement Plus). Due to an ineffective and confusing roll-out by the state in 2001, thousands of teachers were unfairly shut out of this enhanced retirement system, forcing them to teach for an additional 3 to 5 years to reach their maximum retirement benefit. Unfortunately, this continues to impact thousands of teachers across the state nearly a quarter-century later.
The House included language in their version of the FY26 budget to provide educators with this one-time opportunity to buy back into the program.
Last week, a joint letter went to the budget conference committee members in support of the House language. In addition to the AFT Massachusetts and BTU, the letter was signed by the Massachusetts Teachers Association and hundreds of local education unions from every region of the Commonwealth.
“After years of advocacy, we are energized to see movement to fully address the issues around the original roll-out of Retirement plus, which continue to impact teachers nearly a quarter of a century later,” said AFT Massachusetts President Jessica Tang. “We urge the Conferees to include the language from the House budget to provide some of our state's longest-serving teachers with the equitable and secure retirement they deserve.”
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BACKGROUND
In addition to being filed as a budget amendment, the proposal to address the issues with Retirement Plus was also filed as legislation – House Bill 2932 and Senate Bill 1884. Between the two bills and the FY26 budget amendments, there’s record-level support on Beacon Hill: 90 members of the House and 32 members of the Senate.
When Massachusetts launched RetirementPlus in 2001, the state allowed enhanced retirement benefits for teachers willing to contribute 11% of their total salary instead of the standard rate. The program automatically enrolled most teachers hired after July 1, 2001, but required teachers hired before that date to navigate a confusing six-month enrollment window.
This legislation/budget language would provide a one-time window to educators hired before July 1, 2001 to opt into the enhanced retirement benefits that current employees automatically receive. These educators would need to pay the difference between what they’ve paid in deductions since 2001 and what they would have paid if they had been correctly enrolled at the time. Not only is this an important fix to support some of our state’s longest-serving teachers, it would result in substantial savings to local school districts by allowing these educators – all of whom have at least 24 years of service - to retire and be replaced by new teachers at significantly lower salaries.