Teacher salaries in Wakefield are about average for the Greater Boston area, according to a new map showing how average teacher salaries compare across Massachusetts created by WBUR.
On the map, the darker the city or town, the higher the average salary. The map can be viewed for elementary teacher salaries (red), middle school salaries (green) and high school salaries (blue).
To the north, Lynnfield eclipses Wakefield with an average teacher salary of $70,980, and to the south, Melrose has the lowest average salary in the area at $55,897.
Wakefield is on the lower side in terms of expenditure per pupil. Although it’s $11,299 per pupil is higher than Melrose or Reading which both spend about $10k, it’s dwarfed by the amount of spending per pupil in Boston ($17k) and Cambridge (26k).
Below is a chart using numbers from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education that WBUR used in creating their interactive map, showing the average teacher salary by community in ascending order, along with the municipality’s expenditure per pupil.