A teacher’s point of view
By Carl Hintz
I started teaching in Wake County in December of 2021. I currently teach physical science and chemistry. As a new teacher, I can speak to some of the challenges with recruiting
and retaining teachers in NC.
Vacancies and turnover are making it difficult for many schools to function in North Carolina. Schools are forced to resort to creative and unsustainable solutions. For example, I
was asked by my assistant principal to be in two places at once in order to provide a few minutes of instruction each day for a class that didn’t have a teacher. It is difficult to find
enough substitute teachers and classroom teachers are required to give up planning periods to ensure students have adult supervision. The substitute teacher shortage seems to
have a simple solution – higher wages. Recruiting and retaining teachers will prove more challenging.
Many flawed proposals assume teachers are motivated only by financial incentives. The proposal for merit based pay assumes rewarding a fraction of “worthy” teachers with
higher pay will be sufficient to solve the problem of retaining good teachers. These proposals ignore that teachers take pride in our craft, want to become better teachers, and are motivated by the desire to help our students. The public should know merit based pay will require more high stakes standardized testing to implement, which most parents, students, and teachers are against.
Some people may imagine new teachers as dynamic and inspiring, but at first you really don’t know what you’re doing in the classroom. It takes years to become a really good
teacher. New teachers are typically in survivor mode, and so if a school is staffed with a large number of new teachers, it starts to feel like the school as an institution is also in survivor mode—just trying to get through the day. Experienced teachers are then tasked with additional responsibilities to try to keep the listing boat afloat leading to a cycle of burnout and vacancies.
The reason fewer people are going into teaching is not rocket science. The public knows teachers are not treated well in North Carolina. One positive of being a teacher is the
sense of stability of being on the state health plan and in the state pension plan. This is eroded by the states’ decision to kick teachers off of the health plan at the time of retirement.
The state treasurer’s plan to switch from Blue Cross Blue Shield (a nonprofit) to Aetna (a for profit) insurance company along with the spiraling costs of healthcare draw into question whether teachers will be able to count on a high quality health plan in the future.
Longevity pay is a good system to retain teachers, but the current system is broken. Starting teachers make only 37,000 dollars with a one thousand dollar increase for each
year of experience. After 15 years of experience the pay flatlines at 52,000 dollars. Teachers with 25 or more years of experience make 54,000. It would be pretty straightforward
to increase the starting salary to 45,000 dollars and to continue the pay increases at one thousand dollar increments up through 30 years of experience, such that a teacher with 30 years experience would make 75,000 dollars.
This reformed pay scale should then be updated every five years to account for inflation. However, the Republican-controlled North Carolina General Assembly appears unwilling to raise wages for state employees despite inflation and budget surpluses.
An approach that wouldn’t raise wages, but would recruit teachers is to provide full-ride scholarships to public universities to any student who agrees to work as a teacher in North Carolina for five years. The NC Teaching Fellows program provides a forgivable loan for students who want to teach special education, science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. This program works. The Teaching Fellows program is one of the reasons I became a teacher. If the state wants to recruit more teachers, expanding the NC Teaching Fellows program is an obvious place to start. House Bill 825 asks the Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee to study the expansion of the North Carolina Teaching Fellows Program “to ensure a sufficient pipeline of highly qualified teachers to serve underserved and underrepresented communities and to ensure sufficient licensed teachers for hard-to-staff subject areas.”
A more local approach is to sponsor visas. To my knowledge, Wake County does not sponsor visas for teachers, but neighboring counties do sponsor visas. Failing to sponsor
visas is a mistake especially when it comes to language classes where there are some clear advantages to having a “native” speaker. On the positive side, Wake County recently adopted a pay supplement for teachers with a masters degree in their subject area. Pay supplements in Wake, Orange, and Durham counties certainly help, but they are canceled out by spiraling living costs.
The need is not just for teachers and substitute teachers. It is also for bus drivers, school counselors, school nurses, instructional assistants, and other support staff. Not only teachers, but custodians as well, deserve a raise. State employees have seen wages stagnate in the face of inflation, and the latest state budget fails to remedy this decline in real wages. If we wait for the North Carolina General Assembly to raise wages for state employees, we may be waiting for a long time. For this reason labor organizing efforts such as those by UE150 and the NCAE are especially important.
Carl Hintz is a contributing editor at Triangle Free Press.
They teach high school science in Wake Co., N.C