'Alarming increase' in teacher resignations

by T. Keung Hui, News and Observer, April 17, 2014.

Teacher resignations have increased by an “alarming” 41 percent this school year, Wake County school leaders said Thursday, in a development they said makes it harder to keep high-quality educators in the classrooms working with students.

School leaders said that 612 of Wake’s 9,000 teachers have resigned since the beginning of the school year, compared with 433 during the same time a year ago. School officials said the increase in resignations in North Carolina’s largest school system points to the need to raise pay for teachers and to revisit changes made by state legislators to phase out tenure and to eliminate extra pay for advanced degrees.

“Good teachers are having to make hard decisions to leave our classrooms for a better future somewhere else or in another line of work, in another profession – not in our public schools and not in our state,” said Doug Thilman, Wake’s assistant superintendent for human resources, at a news conference at Underwood Elementary School in Raleigh.

“We know anecdotally that financial security and a more manageable workload has a lot to do with these decisions, and we know that’s our job to sound an alarm to stop the teacher flight, particularly from Wake County, but across our state.”

Wake’s news conference and release of data came as teacher pay has emerged as a major issue likely to figure in state and local elections. North Carolina ranks 46th in the nation in average teacher pay.

State House Speaker Pro Tem Paul Stam, an Apex Republican, questioned whether the situation is as dire as Wake is saying.

Wake Superintendent Jim Merrill said the news conference was not a political maneuver but a means to make clear the need for increased salaries and other inducements to keep quality teachers.

“We are not about politics today,” Merrill said in an interview. “We are here to raise an alarm about losing high-quality teachers.”

The state pays the salaries for most public school teachers. There has been one state salary increase since 2008, years under Democratic and Republican control of state government.

Reasons for leaving

Wake asked teachers why they’re resigning midyear. According to the data, more than 200 teachers said they’re leaving because of employment outside of teaching, dissatisfaction with teaching, a career change, to work in another state/government agency, to teach in another state or other reasons. Last year, 117 teachers gave those same reasons for resigning.

Thilman said it’s telling that there was a drop in the number of teachers who said they’re resigning to teach in another North Carolina school system. At the same time, there was an increase in the number of teachers who said they’re leaving to teach in other states.

Stam pointed to the rise in the number of teachers who have retired as being a big reason for the increase in resignations.

A total of 142 teachers have taken early retirement so far this school year, compared with 55 at the same point last school year.

Stam also noted that there was a slight uptick in the number of resignations this year for child-care reasons and that only one teacher was listed in Wake’s report as being dismissed midyear since 2009.

“There is nothing particularly alarming in this report, other than WCPSS cherry-picking numbers to fit its narrative,” Stam wrote in an email message.

Underwood will have lost five teachers, or 25 percent of its classroom teachers, by the end of the school year, according to Principal Jackie Jordan. She noted that two of her teachers have had their houses foreclosed on this year and that one teacher is receiving food stamps.

“If we’re losing teachers at this rate, what’s happening in other schools around the state that may not have as much support from the community, that may not have a beautiful facility?” Jordan said.