The 2026-2027 school year is going to be an important year for ATRS and our members. This is the year we will celebrate the System’s 90th birthday. It was on March 17, 1937, when then-Governor Carl E. Bailey signed Act 266 of 1937 creating the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System.
Throughout those 90 years, the ATRS Board of Trustees and staff have been committed to protecting the retirement security of Arkansas’s past, present, and future education professionals. Our System has remained strong through many economic ups and downs over those decades, thanks to support from state leaders who understand how important retirement security is for employees of Arkansas’s public schools.
With the new school year starting, many new members are joining ATRS for the first time, while others are counting down the days until they retire at the end of this year. This is a great time to highlight what sets ATRS apart, and what makes us so much more valuable to our members than most private retirement plans.
The biggest difference is that ATRS provides a guaranteed monthly benefit for life. That benefit will never go down, and it is backed by more than $25 billion that ATRS invests for its members.
ATRS provides a pension plan, otherwise known as a "Defined Benefit Plan". This is when an employer promises to pay a set monthly benefit for retirement. The employee and employer each contribute to a shared fund, and a pension manager (like ATRS) invests that money to help it grow over time. When the employee retires, that shared fund pays a set monthly benefit for the rest of the employee's life. The benefit amount is based on how much the employee earned in salary and how long they worked for the employer.
Back in 1960, nearly half of all private-sector employees in the U.S. had a pension like ATRS. But over the last 50 years, many private employers have moved to something called a "Defined Contribution Plan." These plans – like 401(k)s and IRAs -- don't promise a lifetime benefit. Instead, the employee is expected to save and invest a portion of their income for retirement. Sometimes, the employer matches part of those savings, but the employee is responsible for managing that money. That means the employee, not the employer, takes on all the risks of funding their retirement.
Private employers like to use Defined Contribution plans because those plans shift that risk away from the employer. If the stock market drops or an employee makes a poor investment choice, they could lose a big part of their retirement savings—with no guaranteed income to fall back on.
That’s not a worry for members who rely on ATRS for their retirement. Our investment portfolio is built to withstand the ups and downs of the stock market. By spreading investment gains and investment losses across generations, we can protect the security of your monthly retirement benefit.
This benefit is available to any ATRS member once they are vested, which means they have at least five years of credited service. Once a member is vested in ATRS, that member is guaranteed a monthly retirement benefit when they reach age 60 or have 28 years of credited service at any age. An ATRS member can also build up additional savings by participating in T-DROP.
T-DROP stands for Teacher Deferred Retirement Option Plan. It allows a member to defer retirement and continue working while benefits accumulate in a cash (savings) account. If you’re interested in the T-DROP program, you can find out more on our website at https://www.artrs.gov/teacher-deferred-retirement-option-t-drop.
And if you would like to learn more about your retirement options through ATRS, you can check out our Retirement Planner or Member Handbook on our website: https://www.artrs.gov/publications
Email us at info@artrs.gov or call us at (501) 682-1517 if you want to talk through your retirement options. Our staff is there to guide you and answer your questions.
Transparent Reporting on Your Retirement Plan
At ATRS, one of the ways we stay open and accountable to our members is by having independent actuaries review our long-term financial obligations every year. Their job is to estimate what ATRS will owe in the future and how well we are positioned to meet those commitments.
To make these estimates, actuaries use assumptions about things like inflation, salary growth, life expectancy, and when people typically retire. Every five years, we work with our actuaries to revisit those assumptions, and test how well those assumptions held up in the previous five years. Our actuaries are now wrapping up the most recent review.
For example, they have found that in the last five years, we saw more teachers retire than assumed, but about the same number of early retirements, and fewer disability retirements. And for public school salaries, we saw that salaries went up a little more than assumed over the last five years, even when we exclude the one-time impacts of the LEARNS Act.
The Board of Trustees met twice this summer to discuss these assumptions, and they made several changes based on recommendations from our independent actuaries. To be clear, these assumption changes don’t affect actual benefit or investment amounts. They only affect the long-term forecasts that we use to measure our financial health.
Each year when our independent actuaries put together their valuation report of our System’s future liabilities and income, we post those valuation reports to our website. That’s just one more way to work to be transparent and accountable to you, our members.
As always, if you have questions about your account or would like to schedule time with one of our counselors to review your retirement options, please email us at info@artrs.gov or call us at (501) 682-1517.
Mark White
Executive Director, ATRS
MarkW@artrs.gov
Office: (501) 621-8853
Cell: (501) 541-2057