‘It’s a mental beat down.’ With stress up, will Fort Worth face a teacher exodus?
Laura Hand, a teacher, didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about retirement before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hand, who teaches eighth grade science at Fort Worth’s Applied Learning Academy, still has a few years before she’ll be able to retire. But when the district brought students back in person and job stress began to pile up, Hand started thinking about what she wants to do next. She’s applied to doctoral programs, and she may renew her certification to work as a personal trainer.
If she leaves teaching, Hand knows she’ll miss her students. She also worries about what would happen if teachers who got into education because they wanted what’s best for children begin to leave the profession in large numbers. But after months of juggling online and in-person students, spending long hours planning lessons for both groups and trying to track down students who never show up for class, Hand said the stress of teaching during the pandemic has taken a toll.
“It’s a mental beat-down,” she said.
For teachers, the pandemic has added new sources of stress to a job that was challenging even in a normal year. Now, there are indications that longer-term teacher workforce issues may loom over the horizon. A recent survey of Texas teachers suggests many are considering leaving the profession. The chief of a professional organization that represents Fort Worth teachers says school districts may have to contend with pandemic-related teacher shortages for years to come.
Texas teachers consider leaving
In November, eight months into the COVID-19 pandemic, 22% of Texas teachers said they were considering other employment, taking a leave of absence or retiring earlier than they’d planned because of the pandemic, according to a survey of teachers released last month by Horace Mann Educators Corp., an Illinois-based insurance company that works primarily with educators and their families.
A larger percentage — 78% of teachers — said their workload was heavier this year than last year. Another 21% said they worked about the same amount this year as last year, and just 1% said their workload was lighter this year.
The company only surveyed teachers in a handful of states, so there’s no way to see how Texas’ results compare to the other 49 states. But Tyson Sanders, vice president of the company’s supplemental division and author of the report, said teachers’ responses to the survey didn’t vary much from one state to the next.
“The education profession is not all that different in Texas than it is in Arizona,” he said.
School districts have asked teachers to do their jobs in a way that’s radically different from the way they typically do it, Sanders said. That’s left many teachers frustrated and anxious, he said. It’s also cut many of them off from the most rewarding parts of the job, he said. Teachers find fulfillment in their interactions with students, he said. But those interactions have been more difficult to manage this year, with many students at home and others at school in person but working from a distance.
Fort Worth teachers ‘play detective’
Hand, the Applied Learning Academy science teacher, said teaching during the pandemic has added hours to her day in ways she didn’t expect. Fort Worth teachers teach in-person and online students simultaneously this year, which requires more planning, she said. But teachers are also expected to track down students who don’t show up to class in either format — something that happens alarmingly often, she said.
Earlier this school year, the four eighth-grade teachers at Hand’s school compiled a list of all the students whom none of them had seen. Once the list was complete, they realized that about one in four students were essentially lost. So the teachers tried calling the students and their parents. When that didn’t work, they took the list to school administrators, who went to students’ homes. In a few cases, missing students showed up once or twice after a home visit, and then never again. But for the most part, she said, the home visits didn’t help, either.
All the while, Hand still has to write lesson plans, teach her classes and field calls and emails from parents and students. She’s fallen into a cycle in which anytime she focuses on one thing, she worries that she’s doing it at the expense of everything else, she said.
“You can only focus on so many things,” she said. “There’s no way that one person can do all of the stuff that we have to do at one time, and play detective trying to find these absent kids.”
Recruiting teachers a challenge
By the time the Fort Worth school district’s fall semester wraps up at the end of January, district officials expect 36 teachers will have retired since the beginning of the school year. That total represents a fraction of a percent of the more than 5,000 teachers in the district. But it’s a marked increase over the 14 teachers who retired at the mid-year mark last year. Last year’s first-semester retirement total was itself a sharp uptick over the two teachers who retired at Christmas break two years prior.
This year’s uptick in teacher retirements is offset by a decline in the number of teachers who are expected to leave the district through voluntary separation by the end of the semester. By month’s end, the district expects to have lost 108 teachers through voluntary separation, retirement or death by mid-year, as compared to 119 last year.
Kermit Spears, the Fort Worth school district’s chief talent officer, said the district will get a better idea of how many teachers plan to leave at the end of the year once the spring semester begins. But he acknowledged that teachers’ jobs are difficult this year.
Teachers’ jobs have changed to such a large degree that many experienced teachers feel like they’re starting over, Spears said. In any time of major change, heightened stress is inevitable, he said. The district has tried to offer support and make changes and accommodations where it could, he said.
“But that doesn’t get you away from what’s happening today,” he said.
One of the district’s biggest challenges this year has been finding substitutes to cover classes when teachers are away. The district has plenty of people on its substitute list, he said, but many don’t want to come in to cover classes because they’re concerned about being exposed to COVID-19.
The district has also had to rethink the way it recruits teachers, he said. Under normal circumstances, the district would hold in-person recruiting fairs. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the district has shifted most of those events to a virtual setting, he said, although the district has an in-person, socially distanced recruiting event scheduled for next month to fill positions in high-need areas like math, science, bilingual education and special education.
But in spite of all those challenges, the district is still a place where young teachers want to come to develop themselves professionally, Spears said. He expects the district will be able to recover from any shortage of teachers the pandemic causes.
“I believe, like a lot of things, that this will pass,” Spears said.
Long-term teacher shortages
Steven Poole, executive director of the United Educators Association in Fort Worth, said many districts, including Fort Worth, will have to contend with teacher shortages for years to come. Many late-career teachers are considering retiring early, if they haven’t done so already, because of the stresses of teaching during a pandemic, he said. Many younger teachers have begun to decide that teaching isn’t for them, he said. If districts want to prevent or minimize those future staffing issues, they need to support teachers now by eliminating needless meetings, paperwork and any other unnecessary duties so teachers can focus on their students, he said.
The pandemic has added stress to what was already a challenging job, Poole said, especially in districts like Fort Worth, where teachers are expected to teach students online and in person simultaneously. That expectation means most teachers work longer hours this year than they have before, he said.
Teachers have always taken some parts of their jobs home with them. They routinely grade papers in the evenings, work on lesson plans before the school day begins and take time out of their weekends to map out their weeks. But this year, those responsibilities have grown even further, Poole said. Now, they have to prepare for in-person and online classes, and students and parents expect them to be available for questions late into the evening. Some teachers in the district say their jobs have expanded to fill nearly all of their waking hours.
“The expectation that teachers teach double duty, both in-person and virtual at the same time, has really demoralized and driven a lot of teachers into the ground,” Poole said.
In a normal year, districts could recruit new teachers to replace those who left the profession, found work in another district or took jobs as school administrators. But working conditions for teachers during the pandemic have caused people who otherwise might consider a career in education to think twice about it, Poole said.
The nationwide debate over when and how to reopen schools in person also left teachers feeling dispirited, Poole said. Many felt like parents and community members either ignored or ridiculed their concerns about returning to school in person, he said.
“Teachers heard a lot of parents and community members saying teachers are selfish for not wanting to go back in the classroom, and if they don’t want to get back in the classroom, just quit,” he said. “Well, teachers are quitting.”
Those conversations were one of the main reasons Olivia Garcia decided to leave the district after teaching there for 11 years. Garcia, a former middle school art teacher, resigned in October, after the district announced teachers would have to return to school in person. During school board meetings that led up to that decision, Garcia heard parents demand the district allow their students to go back to school in person, even after teachers said they were worried for their safety. It was demoralizing, she said.
“It basically felt like the community was fine with us dying,” Garcia said.
Garcia said she has underlying medical conditions that could put her at greater risk if she returned to school in person. She was happy to teach virtually, she said, but the district didn’t give her that option. So she felt like she had no choice but to resign. Since then, Garcia has taken art commissions and offered private art lessons. Her wife, an attorney, supports both of them financially, a factor that Garcia acknowledges made it possible for her leave the district.
Three months after she resigned, Garcia said she misses working with her students. Much of the job was rewarding, she said. She liked helping students find their creativity and develop their skills. She loved seeing students finish a project and get excited about their own success.
But as rewarding as she found the job, Garcia isn’t sure she’ll ever go back to teaching, even after the pandemic ends and life returns to normal.
Garcia finds ways to keep the connections she made at her old school. She keeps in touch with former coworkers. On weekends, she holds a virtual art club on Zoom to help former students continue to develop their artistic skills. Still, she said, the fact that she doesn’t see her old students every day has been sad.
“It’s been really hard to leave my students,” she said. “I felt like I was there for them and not the administration and all the extra stuff.”
This story was originally published January 15, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
