I can't afford to stay in teaching

I’m a teacher. And I’ll be a teacher for another two whole months! That’s another eight weeks with the 20 first-grade children in my room.

I’m a good teacher. No, really, hear me out. I’m good. During my first year of teaching, my students made an average of 1.93 years of reading growth.

Translation: A huge amount.

I’m a bilingual teacher. I teach in a school in which a majority of students are Hispanic and where a large portion of those students’ parents do not speak English. Quite often teachers at my school are thrown into the wind and expected to teach students who don’t speak a lick of English. I frequently teach in English-Spanish-English all day.

As much as I love the 50 children I’ve been privileged to love, teach and laugh with, I’m leaving. I can’t afford to stay any longer.

Every month when I’m paid, my paycheck is spent within an hour. Between my rent, my car payments, loans and paying my credit card off from the previous month’s expenses, I have nothing left.

I can assure you I don’t make enough money to live lavishly. Dinner time at my house is often brown rice and Diet Coke. Just for fun one day, I added all the hours I work (about a third of them completely unpaid yet necessary), and averaged my salary per hour. I made more money per hour while working at a magazine in college.

Even as Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Superintendent Heath Morrison fought with claws and talons with a budget unveiled Tuesday to give teachers a 3 percent salary bump (the first pay increase in half a decade, mind you), my wallet would only be about $100 fatter every month. Hardly enough to stick around for.

This is what we think of teachers. They’re valued less than college students working a part-time job.

Teaching is exhausting. So exhausting, in fact, that on a drive home from work last year, I mangled my car after falling asleep at the wheel.

Let me tell you some stories.

Raul (not his real name) came to me on the first day of school last year. He didn’t speak English and had just arrived in this country a week before. Nine months later, he spoke fluent English and had grown a full two years in reading.

Cristina (again, not her real name) couldn’t read the word “no” on the first day of school. Seven months later, she has grown more than a year and a half in reading.

But I’m leaving. I can’t afford to stay.

I’ll miss my students every day. I’ll miss those smiles, the laughter and their incessant support of my Florida Gators. But, ultimately, I won’t suffer. I have the mobility to move away, make a better life for myself.

What’s most disheartening about the state of education and the valuing (or, rather, lack thereof) of teachers by our state is that Raul and Cristina will suffer. When we essentially force teachers to volunteer in the Tar Heel State, we lose the teachers our students need the most.

I can hope my students are lucky enough to sit in a classroom with many of the incredible teachers I know, but that’s left up to chance.

The legislature’s potential teacher raises are too little and too late; quality teachers have already left and the exodus will only continue.

There’s nothing more magical than spending your days with 20 tiny children, who are consistently mesmerized by the world around them. You should try it. That is, if you can afford it.