If it were not for the dozens of bright-eyed, energetic fourth- and fifth-grade Florida students that Michelle Lucas teaches math and science to each and every day, she’s unsure she would have stuck with her job as a Broward County public school teacher so long.
Historically low pay made more glaring by lingering inflation rates, ever-changing curriculum expectations and new laws restricting what teachers can and cannot talk about in the classroom have led Lucas to consider quitting after nearly three decades on the job.
“The only thing I like is being with the kids and that’s what keeps me here. I’m happy from 8 o’clock to 2 o’clock. It’s the relationships that you build and seeing them learn — that’s amazing,” Lucas, 50, who teaches at Hollywood Hills Elementary School in Hollywood, Fla., told Yahoo News. “But everything else I hate.”
Similar complaints, Lucas said, have become increasingly common among Florida’s 176,000 public school teachers.
“Every change that has been made is to put more work on us without any consideration into the rising prices of everything in the recession,” she said.
Despite a record $21.8 billion dollar state surplus, Florida ranks 48th nationally in terms of teacher pay, with the average teacher’s salary hovering around $51,000 a year. The state also has a teacher shortage, with nearly 10,000 vacancies. That means substitute teachers are often utilized to fill in the gaps, sometimes filling in for an entire school year. At some Florida public schools, meanwhile, students continue to be taught virtually by teachers from several states away.
To try to make up for the teacher shortage, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis this summer signed into law legislation that would allow military veterans with no prior teaching experience the ability to take on classes. He also raised the starting pay for teachers from $40,000 to $49,000 earlier this year in March, bringing up the state’s starting pay from 26th in the nation to 9th. But while DeSantis has been attempting to lure new teachers, his critics say, he has also shown those with experience that they aren’t a top priority.
“I think we saw that [message] throughout the pandemic, ” Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teacher’s union, told Yahoo News. “Yet right now we’re facing the worst teacher staffing shortage we’ve ever seen at least here in the state of Florida and arguably across this nation. And I think that’s something we should be greatly concerned about.”
Veteran teachers in the state say that employing people who lack teaching experience at a time when their own wages have not continued to rise is tantamount to a slap in the face.
“As a teacher who has been teaching for 25 years, we’re getting sandwiched,” Tracie Overdorff, a middle school STEM teacher in Hillsborough County, told WUSF, a National Public Radio member station in the Tampa Bay area. “So [when] you’re raising the bottom level, the upper levels are getting crunched. And I don’t know if many people know this, but at 25 years, you don’t get any more pay increases.”
Marlon Greig, a teacher at Earlington Heights Elementary School in Miami, has two siblings on active duty in the military, but admits that he wouldn’t trust them to teach his own children.
“It’s just not fair for someone to come into a classroom unqualified, unprepared to teach and shape young minds,” Greig told Reuters.
A sharp decline among teachers in the overall enthusiasm about the state of the profession, however, isn’t isolated to Florida….
Read More: In Florida, public school teachers bristle at DeSantis’s changes to education