Incentives Seek to Counter Rising Teacher Turnover, Narrowing Teacher Pipeline
Incentives Seek to Counter Rising Teacher Turnover, Narrowing Teacher Pipeline
The School Board agreed to offer stipends to current employees who help recruit new ones. There’s not a dire local teacher shortage, but fewer are entering the profession and more are leaving early.
BREVARD — Meredith Licht, a veteran English teacher at Brevard High School, always expected to be an education lifer.
“I had great and grand plans to stay 30 years and see it all the way through,” said Licht, 43, president of the Transylvania County Association of Educators.
But that was before state lawmakers started cutting benefits that once helped compensate for the job’s modest pay.
The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 added stress to an already challenging job, Licht said, and the three suicides of high school students in the county and a mounting youth mental health crisis the following school year “took a tremendous toll.”
Teacher pay in North Carolina, meanwhile, slipped further behind that of neighboring states. And Licht, chair of her school’s English Department and its 2013-14 Teacher of the Year, said that “as a 21-year educator” she earns an annual salary of $53,500, or about $10,000 less than her 24-year-old child, a Starbucks manager.
With all these factors in mind, she now says she will retire well before the 30 years required to become fully vested in the state teacher retirement system.
“I plan to take a little bit of a financial hit and retire five years early,” she said.
An increasing number of Transylvania County Schools teachers are making similar decisions, said Assistant Superintendent Brian Weaver, who at Monday’s School Board meeting presented an incentive plan to help recruit not just licensed teachers, media specialists and counselors, but badly needed custodians, bus drivers and cafeteria workers.
The plan, which received Board approval, will pay $750 to current district employees recruiting new workers who stay on the job for at least four months. The total cost of the package, forecast to be less than $20,000, will be covered by a federal program designed to help schools recover from the pandemic.
Unlike North Carolina as a whole, the district is not currently facing an acute teacher shortage, Weaver said.
The number of teacher vacancies statewide soared to nearly 4,500 at the beginning of the current school year, while Transylvania entered the year with only one unfilled licensed position, a district psychologist, he said.
And its percentage of teachers leaving for other districts in the state — called the mobility rate — was the fourth lowest among North Carolina counties last school year, according to a new report from the State Board of Education.
But fewer young people are entering the profession, Weaver said, and more mid- and late-career teachers are departing.
The district already is already aware that 33 of its 500 employees will retire or leave their jobs for other reasons at the end of the school year, Weaver said. Twenty of them are teachers — out of a total of 264 positions — and a disproportionate number of these are highly valued, experienced teachers.
Some are retiring early, as Licht plans to do.
“We’re not seeing the full 30-year retirements,” Weaver told the Board.
But also, he said, mid-career teachers are reconsidering their choice of profession after looking at cuts in incentives documented in a recent story by nonprofit NC Policy Watch.
Starting a decade ago, the state removed “career status” that teachers say protected them from arbitrary firings (and that opponents said allowed too many underperforming educators to stay on the job).
That same year, the state eliminated the 10-percent supplement for new teachers receiving master’s degrees, and in 2014 it cut “longevity pay” meaning that after 15 years on the job, teachers can look forward to only one more seniority-based bump in salary — at 25 years.
Finally, a program that provided a bridge in health-care coverage for retired teachers until they qualified for Medicare was cut for teachers hired after the start of 2021.
Put it all together, Weaver said, and many teachers who are young enough to pursue other professions are doing so.
“We are very thankful for every raise that is received,” he said in a January interview, referring to a pay increase approved for the current state budget.
But “the problem I see in the teacher salary model is the stagnant range for teachers’ salaries,” he said. “If I’m a teacher in year 15 or 16 and thinking, ‘What does next year hold for me?’ I don’t see much incentive.”
Neither do young people who might have once chosen a career in education, said former School Board member Marty Griffin, imagining the job pitch from principals to prospective teachers.
“ ‘We don’t pay very much. You work long hours. Your state has already taken your retirement health insurance and now it’s trying to take away your retirement,’ ” said Griffin, a longtime coach and athletic director who serves as president of the Transylvania County Retired School Personnel organization.
“Let me ask you, would you take that job?”
Nearby South Carolina currently pays starting teachers a base salary of $40,000 per year, and Gov. Henry McMasters recently announced a plan to raise this amount to $42,500. In North Carolina, the starting base salary is $37,000.
More evidence of the state’s slipping competitiveness was compiled in a report published this week by BEST NC, a business-backed nonprofit that advocates for improved education.
During the 2000-01 school year, the average inflation-adjusted state teachers’ salary was about $65,000, the 19th highest in the country, the report said. As of last school year, it had fallen to 33rd with an average salary of $54,863.
The total value of benefits offered to new teachers in North Carolina has also slipped, according to NC Policy Watch.
This package is worth less than $20,000 per year, the group reported, which is lower than the total provided in any neighboring states, and about $12,000 lower than the value of benefits available to new teachers in its most generous neighbor, Georgia.
Prospective teachers are apparently getting the message.
The number enrolling in education programs across the state — traditionally the main path to the profession — plummeted by 39 percent between 2021 and 2022, according to an article posted last month on EdNC.org.
“North Carolina is witnessing a tremendous decline in people seeking to become teachers, which could lead to a large number of teacher vacancies in the 2024-25 school year,” the report said.
Weaver said an increase in the number of teachers entering education from other professions will help offset that trend. But he also sees clear signs of declining interest in teaching, including a decrease in the number of qualified applicants applying for openings, as well as a roughly 40 percent drop in attendance at the regional job fairs that are crucial to the district's recruitment efforts.
That work is aided by the natural beauty and high quality of life available in Transylvania, he said in the earlier interview, but hampered by the county’s skyrocketing housing costs.
Weaver said he warns every applicant about the county’s shortage of workforce housing. But six prospective teachers who accepted jobs last spring and summer later pulled out after searching for a place to live, he said. “Two to six weeks later (they) sent their regrets, saying they were unable to relocate here due to a lack of adequate housing.”
In North Carolina, unlike in many other states, most of the funding for teacher pay comes from the capitol, as do decisions about salaries and benefits. Local school funding is determined by Transylvania County Commissioners and several of them have previously pointed to Transylvania’s high ranking statewide in per-student expenditures for education.
Local contributions include a teacher salary supplement of 8.5 percent and 9 percent for teachers who have been in the district 25 years or more. The average amount paid in these supplements — $3,757 — was lower than the state average last school year but was exceeded in Western North Carolina only by Buncombe and Henderson counties and the city of Asheville, according to the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners.
The county could do more, including possibly, offering housing stipends for new teachers, Licht said, “or we could actually offer some workforce housing.”
Lacking that, Weaver told the Board, the incentive program seeks to take advantage of the high satisfaction rates of many school employees — at least as measured by the low percentage of them who move to jobs in other districts.
“I believe our employees are our best recruiters,” he said.
Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com
Loved Marty Griffin’s imaginary job pitch.
The pay for one of the most important jobs (being a teacher) is simply embarrassing.