Days after meeting his students for the first time, Spanish teacher Brayden Borges constructs lesson plans in his new desk. He arrived in March to replace a teacher who also arrived as a replacement for a former teacher but eventually chose to leave. “It’s something I’m used to,” Borges said. “I have never started at a school at the beginning of the year.” Photo by Matteo Winandy
Story by Elle Polychronis
A newly graduated teacher is single and lives in an apartment, fresh-faced and eager to work.
“After a few years, they get married,” said Clay Robison, public affairs specialist for Texas State Teachers Association. “They realize that their colleagues who they went to college with are moving ahead. Then they want to buy a house or a nicer car. They want budgets to make ends meet.”
It’s this chain of events, according to Robison, leading teachers to leave the profession.
In a February survey by the Texas American Federation of Teachers, 66% of teachers in Texas have considered leaving their profession because of low wages, workload stress, and health and safety concerns.
“Pay and [the coronavirus] have been the main reasons,” Robison said.
Over the past decade, teacher pay in the U.S. remained flat. Data from the National Education Association shows wages were stagnant from 2009 to 2020 and starting salaries fell 1.2% when adjusted for inflation. When compared to other professions requiring college degrees, teachers make 20% less, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
“I think it’s a common thing for teachers to leave and it’s a scary thing,” former teacher Kelsey Frederick said. “I hope that teachers can find things that tell them that it’s not scary to want to leave.”
Frederick taught in Gordon, Texas and in New Caney, Texas as a first, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh grade teacher in addition to being a junior high and high school coach and teaching math and science.
“It was awesome [in the beginning],” Frederick said. “It was a lot of work, but it paid off. I had lots of good relationships with students and families.”
But once she came back from maternity leave for the second time, she realized that she wanted a job that didn’t take away her energy and time.
“[Leaving] was bittersweet,” Frederick said. “I thought that I would work that job until retirement. It was hard to let go of that goal, great co-workers and great administration, but it was exciting to look for new jobs.”
After her teaching career, she became a project manager for a marketing company and serves as a messenger between the client and the company.
“I’ve been healthier and happier,” Frederick said. “I have been present for my family and friends. [It’s been] better work-life balance. I looked forward to learning and doing more things.”
The coronavirus introduced a host of new problems for teachers on top of existing burdens. Teachers had to engage students in the classroom and those attending from home simultaneously.
“It was hard to establish relationships in the classroom because generally that year you maybe had 15 kids tops in a room,” AP European History teacher Brad Sanders said. “It was really hard to build [a] classroom culture in [an] environment where you had people at home.”
Another concern for teachers was the risk of infecting their loved ones and students with the coronavirus as a result of in-school exposure, something that Robison believes became less urgent after the vaccine.
“But then the Delta variant hit, and then the Omicron variant hit,” he said. “We think teachers finally had it [after that].”
Biology teacher Meredith Townsend said while she saw expectations of a return to normal at the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year, the reality is the opposite.
“I don’t think [students] recovered as well as I think we had hoped,” Townsend said. “Ninth graders right now have executive functioning skills, like study habits and things like that, of seventh graders.”
One new stressor for teachers is the process of finding consistent long-term substitutes, the difficulty of which has forced teachers into subbing for other teachers.
“There’s more outside work for teachers to make sure the person next door has a substitute covered [and] printing substitute plans for people,” Townsend said. “When I had [the coronavirus], [biology teacher Jennifer] Giannou-Moore had to print all my substitute plans and get stuff ready everyday for me while I was gone.”
The main challenges teachers face in the classroom, in English teacher Rebecca Wilson’s experience, are meeting the emotional needs of her students and providing them with extra academic support.
“Last year was more of a disruption and learning how to do all the technology on top of making sure kids were learning while they were virtual,” she said. “This year has been a lot of catching kids up and making sure that they are assimilated back into the classroom well because so many kids haven’t sat in a classroom in over a year.”
These stressors contribute to that 66% of teachers who have considered resigning. Highland Park is not immune to the low-morale issue either. Junior Brian Rosen is on his third Spanish teacher this year. Between teachers, he bounced from substitute to substitute.
“We were given assignments by one substitute one day and then a couple days later we started doing a completely different assignment,” Rosen said. “As a student trying to learn a foreign language, the lack of structure and the lack of having someone to talk to about any questions you have was very frustrating.”
Rosen acknowledged that he believed circumstances in and outside the district are difficult for educators.
“I think I can speak on behalf of the student body here that we are very grateful for what the teachers do,” he said.