Teachers in West Virginia stressed to me on Tuesday that the salary issue pales in comparison to the key problem that prompted the walk-out: the rising costs associated with the state’s health-insurance system, the Public Employees Insurance Agency, typically referred to by its acronym PEIA. “[People] see us out here and think it’s money—they think it’s only about the pay raise. It is so not about the pay raise,” Annette Jordan, a teacher at Hedgesville High in Berkeley County, told me as she picketed in front of the school’s campus along Route 9. Holding a sign that read, “I’d take a bullet for YOUR child but PEIA WON’T cover it,” she explained that because of structural changes to the health-insurance system, her family’s monthly premiums would more than double starting July 1. An agreement hasn’t yet been reached on PEIA; Justice said on Tuesday that he’s going to appoint a task force to “try to look for solutions and a permanent fix” for the health-insurance system.

Jordan and others also pointed to what they described as a wholesale attack on the teaching profession—through legislation proposing to lower qualifications and to eliminate seniority protections—in explaining the reasons for the statewide walk-out. In part because of how little West Virginia pays its teachers—$45,622 on average in 2016, making it 48th in the country for educator salaries—districts have had to lower the hiring bar to fill vacancies. A sizable percentage of the instructors who’ve been hired for full-time teaching positions lack conventional certification and training: Close to four in 10 instructors teaching math courses for students in grades 7 through 11, for example, are not fully certified. Meanwhile, teachers haven’t had a statewide salary raise since 2014.

West Virginia has in recent years grappled with a budget deficit and a weak economy that Justice and policymakers have said hamper their ability to increase teachers’ pay and to fully fund PEIA. But critics argue that politicians’ resistance to taxing coal, natural gas, and manufacturing corporations is to blame for the lack of funds.

Educators say these realities help explain why West Virginia ranks so poorly compared to other states when it comes to its educational performance. The state received a C- in Education Week’s 2017 report card on school quality, and it got one of the worst grades in the nation in the analysis’s “chance for success” category, which uses various metrics to “look at the role of education in promoting an individual’s chance for success over the course of a lifetime.”

As soon as Justice announced the 5 percent raise, teachers and their supporters were quick to worry that the upshot of the latest development could be business as usual. “We’re highly skeptical that this [pay-raise announcement] was meaningful,” Audra Slocum, a West Virginia University assistant professor of English education who collaborates with a lot of K-12 teachers, said in an email on Wednesday. “Rather, it was a clear attempt to disrupt the momentum of the teachers.”