After Tough Year, Teachers Hold On Through Pandemic — For Now

ACROSS AMERICA — This year has been grueling for teachers such as Stefanie Miller and Annette Lang.

One got COVID-19. The other worried about getting sick. Neither felt safe, but only one could afford to leave.

Miller, a second-grade teacher in Broward County, Florida, contracted a severe case of COVID-19 last spring. Even though May 3-7 is Teacher Appreciation Week, each day Miller goes to work is a struggle, she told Patch news partner Chalkbeat — not just because of her lingering symptoms, but because of how hard it is to keep students engaged through the pandemic.

She thought about quitting, but she didn’t. She has taught for 25 years. She also needs her health insurance.

Meanwhile, ongoing health concerns pushed Lang, a teacher at South River Elementary School in New Jersey, to retire years earlier than planned. She was going to wait until she was 65, but the pandemic changed everything, she told CNN.

"I had my first panic attack in 60 years of my life. I was worried about getting sick, I was also worried about bringing something home," Lang told the network.

These two stories are common among U.S. teachers who started the 2020-21 school year choking on a thick cloud of uncertainty and anxiety.

Armed only with a hodgepodge of hasty guidelines intended to protect staff and students from the coronavirus, teachers have spent the last year navigating a chaotic new normal — a mix of in-person and online classes while simultaneously worrying about their health, as well as the health of their students and co-workers.

While some like Miller are sticking it out, others like Lang have decided it’s all too much to bear.

After the first few months of the pandemic, some teachers took early retirement from an industry already besieged by teacher shortages. Others considered leaves of absence. In the Phoenix area, a music teacher was fined $2,000 for resigning after he decided that returning to a virtual classroom with other teachers wasn't worth the risk.

Nearly a year later, more than 53 percent of U.S. schools are offering daily, in-person classes, The New York Times reported, adding that for the first time, the number of students attending school virtually or in hybrid classes has actually dropped.

Something else has dropped, too. Teacher morale has crashed over the course of the pandemic, according to surveys conducted by EdWeek Research Center.

Teachers say they’re spread thin with technology challenges, a decline in student engagement, the fear of contracting COVID-19, and other personal responsibilities. Many teachers also said they feel unappreciated by the general public, specifically when it comes to the debate on whether to resume full in-person learning.

Through it all, many teachers have considered walking away.

But while that may be the case, little evidence exists that they’re actually leaving the profession after a tumultuous and unprecedented school year. And what evidence there is paints differing pictures, depending on whom you ask.

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In Chicago, most teachers have stayed put, bucking dire national predictions that a mass exodus of teachers would follow the return to school for the 2020-21 year.

Other state data suggests the same.

In South Carolina, teacher turnover hit a five-year low. In Colorado, the share of teachers leaving or switching districts declined from 16 percent to 14 percent. In Washington state, that number dropped from 16 percent to 15 percent, according to a recent Chalkbeat analysis. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization that reports on education issues.

“I don’t think that people aren’t frustrated,” Marguerite Roza of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab told Chalkbeat. “I don’t think they are not scared to come back. It’s just that, all told, the job is still worth having, even with the pressures of the pandemic.”

However, that’s not the case for everyone.

In Michigan, data suggests that since last August, there’s been a 44 percent increase in public school teacher retirements compared with the same period in 2019-20, Lansing-based WILX reported. Before the end of this school year, at least 749 educators had left the profession.

Meanwhile, Long Beach Unified, one of the largest school districts in California, reported a 35 percent increase in teacher leaves of absence to the Learning Policy Institute at Stanford University, CNN reported.

If anything, COVID-19 was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Lisa Pelligrino, a fourth-grade teacher in Maryland, told EducationWeek.

A teacher for seven years, Pelligrino dealt with plenty of stress leading up to the pandemic. Her class size increased, support was cut back, and a promised pay raise was rescinded, she told EdWeek. She spent hours after work grading work and planning lessons. She couldn’t sleep at night.

Faced with the certainty of a return to full, in-person learning, Pelligrino took a three-month leave of absence.

“As much as I love my students, I’m not going to kill myself over this. I don’t mean COVID kill, I mean they’re working me to death,” she told EdWeek. “Frankly, I would rather be a barista at Starbucks right now than a teacher, because at the end of the day, I could walk away from work.”

So, what now?

President Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan allocates $128 billion to K-12 schools across the United States, which includes hiring more teachers. It also will infuse an abundance of cash into improving the U.S. economy, which ultimately could give teachers more job options.

Timed with the 2020-21 school year’s quickly approaching end, it’s possible the number of teachers leaving the profession could spike.

One thing is certain. To retain teachers, teaching itself can't return to normal, Colin Sharkey, executive director of the Association of American Educators told Patch in an email.

"Normal was not serving enough kids and educators well. We need better than normal," he wrote. "This is going to require greater investment in attracting, training, and retaining talented educators. It will also mean rethinking what and how we structure and finance education to ensure all students have access to a safe and effective learning environment—something too many students went without for the past 13 months.”