Author Spotlight
Peyton Moore
Another down.
When social studies teacher Shannon Nolan graduated from K-State, her education department’s class was 23 students hoping to be teachers. A year after graduation, there were 20. The next, 15.
The most recent, an elementary education teacher, promised she was in it for life when they received their diplomas in May of 2019.
“I’m out,” she texted in the groupchat of Nolan’s graduating class — only seven of whom are still teaching.
While the other 16 teachers who have already moved on from the profession sent their congratulations, Nolan finalized her substitute plans — crying to her fiancé while praying her students wouldn’t tear up her classroom or fall behind other hours.
Despite the low pay and stress that drove the rest of her class from the profession, Nolan is still committed to teaching due to her love of kids. But that doesn’t make handling the stress any easier.
“Every single one of us teachers want to teach kids and aid them to be informed citizens,” Nolan said. “But after COVID, [teachers] are realizing that, just because [we] want these kids to be successful doesn’t mean that [we] can’t take [our] own mental health in consideration.”
Almost two in five teachers plan to quit in the next two years, according to a June survey of members of the American Federation of Teachers union.
Nolan works every day to not be part of that stat — sponsoring four activities for the extra pay, buying posters of famous figures in World History to decorate her classroom and keeping her at-home grading to a minimum to separate work and personal time. But still, Nolan and 55% of National Education Association members say they’ll leave teaching sooner than they had originally planned as of February. The mass exodus of teachers, counselors and para professionals has increased nationwide after feeling undervalued when suffering through the unbearable pressure of the profession.
But according to English teacher Samantha Feinberg, teachers have been burnt out for years. Leading five to six classes a day, with upward of 30 students with diverse learning styles and over 140 papers to grade — Feinberg is left exhausted. The next day, she does it all over again.
“There’s always things to follow up on,” Feinberg said. “Nobody likes stuff to fall through the cracks. But even when I’m doing my best, I’m sure there’s something I overlooked or missed or screwed up.”
But 2020 just made teacher burnout more obvious.
In August of 2021, 37% of NEA members considered leaving education sooner than planned. Since this Febuary, this number has almost doubled to 55%, according to NEA. Now, from a poll of 39 East teachers, 41% said that the pandemic made them reconsider staying in the education profession.
Once in-person education was back in session, social studies teacher and East’s NEA representative Stephen Laird witnessed colleagues who he never thought would consider quitting reevaluate their career choice due to the strain of teaching via zoom, masking and stress of getting sick in the classroom that the pandemic caused.
“[When] we see more of our peers start leaving the profession [after the pandemic], it makes us [teachers] think to ourselves, ‘What should we do?'” Laird said.
Teachers across the nation were doing what seemed impossible during virtual schooling, as the community named them and frontline workers “heroes,” according to Laird. But once in-person school returned, kids fell behind, which added ample pressure on teachers to refine their curriculum to only the critical lessons.
An anonymous survey was given to the East faculty and received 39 total responses. One teacher explained that the district is constantly changing their goals and curriculum for teachers.
“The pressure is now much worse, because the pandemic shifted concerns and focus across the board,” the teacher said. “Instead of being allowed to focus on what we see in real life every day, we’re being held hostage by those in a building miles away without any kind of understanding of our students. It’s a huge issue in education.”
COVID-19 encouraged teachers to inspect what worked and what didn’t about their teaching styles, Laird said. While online, teachers considered how they wanted to adjust their teaching.
“Remote learning was hard,” Feinberg said. “Masking was hard, hybrid learning was hard. Taking care of your families and keeping them alive while trying to continue your job was so hard. But all of humanity is burned out from COVID, and teachers are just a part of that humanity.”
Another anonymous teacher that responded to the survey agrees with Feinberg that it was “infinitely” harder to come back to school and immediately resume teaching when years of learning was lost.
“They just went on… as if nothing happened and left teachers and students to figure out how to get back to normal,” the teacher said. “The disruption to the educational process called for major procedural and discipline policies and nothing was done. Our school has no standards for conduct, and it will be years before we get back on track.”
This caused more bad days filled with kids fighting back about wearing their mandatory mask than good days, according to Laird.
During the pandemic, the conversation of, “Is this something I still want to do?” was prevalent in the profession. According to the NEA, 86% of members say they’ve seen more educators leaving the profession or retiring early since the start of the pandemic in 2020. More than a half-million teachers have left the profession since the start of 2020, according to governing.com.
According to the anonymous poll, 95% of teachers believe they have seen a higher percentage of colleagues leave the teaching profession since the pandemic.
The biggest push for teachers leaving the profession is the pay and time — or lack thereof, according to Feinberg and Laird. According to the SMSD employee salary schedule, first-year teachers with a master’s degree start making $52,544 before taxes. The average homeowner salary in Prairie Village is just over $81,082, according to zippia.com.
Teachers like Nolan are watching friends and colleagues leave the profession for jobs with higher salaries, better benefits and less stress causing Nolan to question if teaching is a sustainable life-long career.
“I love my students,” Nolan said. “Even the ones that drive me up the wall, I love them all. But that doesn’t mean I should be paid less than another professional.”
The overwhelming support from parents and administrators and binder of student thank-you notes have been a huge factor for Nolan to stay in the profession, despite low pay.
Nolan believes her daily stress of “business meetings” like her friends may have is vastly comparable to those in a corporate level job. She’s not just sitting at the meetings — she’s running, presenting and differentiating the material for 30 people who have never seen a population pyramid before. Between meetings, she gets a total of 30 minutes to prepare materials, evaluate how each meeting went and take care of personal needs.
Even though she leaves the classroom with bear hugs from current and past students that come to her classroom just to chat, she can only describe it as draining.
“My friend will text me and say, ‘Hey, I’m going for a walk right now’ [or] ‘Hey, I’m going to the bathroom when I want,’” Nolan said. “They’re showing me that there is a way out.”
But guilt results from leaving the profession, according to former anatomy and biology teacher Tim Brill. Brill — who quit teaching last school year and is now a Client Success Manager at the healthcare technology startup Spark Change — chose teaching as a way to share his love for learning about how the human body works. Despite the guilt, the non-teaching activities such as hallway patrol, managing behavioral issues and the extreme pressures that came with the profession along with the discouraging pay repelled him.
Brill explained the pressure that teachers are supposed to be role models and a support system for their upward of 130 students. An anonymous teacher explains that the biggest difference from pre- and post-pandemic is the increased mental health needs.
“It’s a really overwhelming and anxiety-provoking feeling to know you are not helping a student in the way he or she needs to be helped,” the teacher said. “You take that home with you.”
Laird explains these pressures lead to an eternal fight for higher pay — a fight teachers have to battle alone in politics. According to Laird, teachers who are members of the NEA have found success in reducing workload — like the contract fight in February of 2020 that reduced workload for most secondary teachers from six to five classes and gave a pay increase. But salaries are simply out of their control.
A teacher’s frustration with feeling undervalued by society can be seen directly in politics, according to Laird. This frustration is real specifically in Kansas, according to npr.com, as Kansas lawmakers have stripped state protected tenure from teachers and cut classroom funding.
For Laird as the NEA representative and other teachers seeing no increase in their paycheck and little legislative action, politicians use these issues in their campaigns as talking points for debates — resulting in no progressive action.
“We had to fight that fight for years and the legislature and the governor were fighting against us,” Laird said. “But these are the same people who say, ‘Happy Teacher Day,’’ but all they do is give us a thumbs up.”
Teacher Appreciation Week, from May 1 and May 5, often consists of cards from students, treats in the teachers lounge and restaurant discounts. Though teachers appreciate the coffee mugs and thank you cards, it’s simply not enough, according to Feinberg.
“[The government] needs to care about education, and want to pay us more,” Feinberg said. “It’s not just pay, it’s about caring about the learning, and growth, development and access of students. And if you care about that, you’ll care about the teachers who are teaching them, and you can care about them. You’ll want them to be valued. And if you value them, you’ll pay them.”
According to the Economic Policy Institute, Kansas teachers face a teacher wage penalty of 22.6% less than comparable college graduates as of 2021. This number has grown nationwide throughout the years, with a staggering 18.4% increase from 1993-2021, with a previous penalty of 4.2%. Public schools are funded by the government as public-sector wages, so their salaries stay stagnant compared to competitive professions or private-sector wages, according to newsnationnow.com. Edweek.com explains that the national average teacher salary has decreased over the last decade by an estimated 3.9 percent due to inflation.
Since the pandemic, SMSD has used government ESSER funds to help mitigate illness and support teachers, according to Feinberg. In both 2021 and 2022, SMSD teachers were given stipends for staying another year. Brill and Nolan both agreed that East’s administration has been a crucial resource for them to overcome the pressure that comes from parents and the district by being flexible with how they teach their lessons and supportive of those decisions.
“It gave me autonomy to choose how I found success as a teacher,” Brill said.
Nolan finds support through her students’ parents, like East parent Kathy Schirger, who has not only respected her as a teacher but taught her kids to do the same, bringing her coffee or staying after school to help decorate bulletin boards. Nolan has been there for senior Kate Schirger since her freshman year World Regional Studies class, her mom said. Schirger has
learned and taught her kids that respect means recognizing what teachers do for their students, from discussing real world hardships in World Regional Studies to being 140 kids support systems during a hard day — a lesson she hopes every parent and student informs themselves on.
“Talk to them and they appreciate what they’re doing, send them a note or get them a cup of coffee,” Schirger said.
As teachers continue to leave the profession due to the pressures of the profession, gaping holes in departments remain. The ratio of teachers hired to job openings in education has reached new lows, with 0.59 teachers hired for every open position at the start of the 2021-2022 school year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it hasn’t always been this way — in 2010, the ratio was 1.54 hires for every position.
And in the Shawnee Mission district, there were more resignations in the 2020-2021 school year than hires, according to the Director of Human Resources Jeremy Higgins.
“We are losing quantity of teachers, but [we’re] also losing a lot of high quality teachers, which is ultimately bad for students,” Brill said. “I’m scared of what the schools are gonna look like. Not just 10 years from now. I’m scared of what they’re gonna look like in one or two years, because of the high level of turnover.”
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