Teachers in Richland Parish, Louisiana, will receive bonuses of as much as $50,935 this year, the Richland Parish School Board announced, funded by a surge in sales tax revenue linked to Meta Platforms’ Hyperion data center construction project. The bonuses, which for some teachers exceed their base salaries, come at a time when public opposition to data centers is rising across the U.S.
The board said in a news release that teachers would get bonuses of as much as $50,935, up from a maximum of $10,200 last year. Support staff will receive bonuses of up to $17,472, compared with $3,323 a year earlier. The district had 163 full-time teachers in the 2024-25 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Teacher salaries range from $29,504 to $52,335, according to the district’s website.
The bonuses are funded through a 1% sales tax the school board has collected since a 1968 ordinance. The parish brought in $42.9 million in sales and use tax for the first nine months of the current fiscal year, more than double the total for the same period last year, according to the Northwest Louisiana Finance Authority.
Meta also made a separate $22.4 million tax payment to the parish in May, a representative for the finance authority said. The payment is equivalent to 1% of Meta’s construction purchases under a state and local tax-break program for data-center equipment. The local school district receives more than half of that payment.
Scott Franklin, a director of the parish’s chamber of commerce who sold land for the data center to Meta, said the bonuses were a major benefit for the area. “Anybody that complains about teachers getting a $50,000 check, they just instantly lose all credibility with me,” Franklin said.
The windfall comes as data-center development faces growing public skepticism. A Reuters/Ipsos survey found that more than half of respondents would oppose new data centers in their communities, with the effect on housing costs and utility rates a top concern.
Once construction of the $10 billion, 4 million-square-foot Hyperion facility is complete, Meta will pay property taxes at a discounted rate — an 80% abatement for a set number of years — but will still pay the remaining 20% in the interim, the finance authority said. The agreement requires Meta to employ a minimum of 500 people at the site at all times.
“Sales tax at that level may be somewhat temporary,” Franklin said, but property taxes “will live forever.”
Friday Ellis, the mayor of Monroe, the largest nearby city, estimated that Meta’s data center has brought roughly 8,000 new workers to the area. Richland Parish has about 20,000 residents, according to the most recent Census count, and its population had been declining before the data-center project was signed. The population of nearby Ouachita Parish, which includes Monroe, had also been declining.
“We’ve been in a batting slump for probably three decades. Like most Southern towns, we’ve really exported talent, exported business,” Ellis said of Monroe.
Monroe’s city school district said Thursday that teacher bonuses this year would be 38% higher than last year, citing rising sales-tax revenue.