By Meghan Bobrowsky and Ben Eisen
A school district in Louisiana says some of its teachers will receive bonuses of more than $50,000 this year thanks to increased tax revenue linked to a Meta Platforms data-center construction project.
Local officials said the windfall for teachers, funded by a portion of the parish's sales tax, reflects an influx of economic activity that is helping to revitalize a slumping region. 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 last year's total, according to the Northwest Louisiana Finance Authority. Meta also separately made a $22.4 million tax payment to the parish in May, it said.
The bonuses, which for some teachers might be larger than their salaries, come at a moment when public opposition to data centers is swelling in the U.S., with their effect on affordability high on the list of concerns voiced in polls and in public comments. More than half of respondents in a new Reuters/Ipsos survey said they would oppose new data centers in their communities.
An ordinance passed in 1968 lets the school board collect a 1% sales tax to fund teacher bonuses. The Richland Parish School Board said in a news release that teachers would get bonuses of up to $50,935 this year, up from a maximum of $10,200 last year. It is unclear how many teachers will get the full $50,000. Salaries in the school district range from $29,504 to $52,335, according to the latest available data on the district's website.
"As you can see, things like this are huge benefits to our people here," said Scott Franklin, a director of the parish's chamber of commerce. A former rice farmer, Franklin sold land for the data center to Meta. "Anybody that complains about teachers getting a $50,000 check, they just instantly lose all credibility with me," he said.
Meta and other tech companies have increasingly been seeking talking points to counter the surge in negative sentiment, which threatens to impede the build-out of computing capacity needed for their AI models and products.
When it first announced the plans for Meta's 4 million-square-foot Louisiana data center, called Hyperion, the state's economic development body said the $10 billion facility would directly create 500 local jobs, indirectly stimulate the creation of 1,000 more and employ 5,000 workers in its construction.
It is unclear how many of those will be long-term jobs. Once fully built, data centers typically require relatively few employees to operate them, raising the prospect that at least some of the commerce that yielded this year's mega-bonuses won't recur.
While the thousands of workers building its data center have been paying regular sales tax on their toilet paper, tacos and other goods and services, Meta itself is paying tax on the costs of construction through an alternative mechanism.
The company took advantage of a new state and local tax-break program for the purchase or lease of data-center equipment. Meta makes one annual tax payment to Richland Parish that is equivalent to 1% of its purchases, a representative for the Northwest Louisiana Finance Authority said.
Meta made its first payment in May, totaling $22.4 million, the representative said. The local school district gets more than 50% of that payment.
Once construction of the data center is complete, Meta will pay property taxes on the completed facility at a discounted rate. The company gets a tax abatement of 80% for a set number of years but still has to pay the remaining 20% in the meantime, the finance authority said . As part of the agreement, Meta has to employ a minimum of 500 people at the site at all times.
"Sales tax at that level may be somewhat temporary," Franklin, the chamber of commerce director, said, but property taxes "will live forever."
Friday Ellis, the mayor of the biggest nearby city, Monroe, estimated that Meta's data center has brought roughly 8,000 new workers to the area.
The project stretches for miles, with numbered gates. Equipment is everywhere, and the site is so busy that it has created traffic on the surrounding roads, a Wall Street Journal reporter who visited the site in March observed. Once completed, the facility will cover an area equivalent to 70 football fields.
Richland Parish has about 20,000 residents, according to the most recent Census count, and its population had been declining before signing the Meta data-center project. 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.
With sales-tax revenue now rising, Monroe's city school district also said Thursday that employee bonuses would be 38% higher than last year.
The Richland Parish school district's bonus checks are sent out twice a year, in June and December, to supplement teachers' salaries, and the amounts distributed are dependent on the amount of tax collected, according to a document from the Richland Parish School Board.
The rural district had 163 full-time teachers in the 2024-25 school year, according to the latest available data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Support staff will get bonuses of as much as $17,472, up from $3,323 last year. Other teachers will get bonuses of varying sizes, depending on how long they have worked in the district.
News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with Meta.
Write to Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com and Ben Eisen at ben.eisen@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 11, 2026 21:16 ET (01:16 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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