A report from advocacy group Mississippi First reveals that some teachers are leaving for higher pay in neighboring states, and that students graduating with college debt don't make enough on a teacher salary to pay that debt consistently.
Melanie King taught English for seven years to middle school students, and said she left the profession after she was assaulted by a parent last year and didn't get the support she needed from her superiors. While King agrees that low income is pay an issue, she says that wasn't the reason she left a job she loved.
“It’s not the money,” King says. “It’s the way we are treated as if we have no value… like we don’t matter, like [the administration] can replace us at any time.”
Christy Hardy now has an online business but taught in Mississippi for 13 years. She resigned from teaching elementary school in Northeast Mississippi last year citing unresolved behavioral problems from certain students that made her feel unsafe. She says she loved the administration she worked for, but not even they could help her with certain students and issues.
“I was going to school and I felt like I was going to battle,” Hardy says. “I felt like I never knew what the day was gonna bring me… if someone was going to get into a fight, if someone was going to cry… it was very difficult.”
Lauren Lewis taught art in Mississippi for six years before leaving the profession. She says the breaking point for her was when a supervisor chastised her in a note after she told him she needed to use her planning period instead of substitute for another teacher. Lewis says she had given up her planning periods often but when she told her boss that she really needed the time to prepare for her own class, he left her a note with a dollar in it telling her that she “didn’t deserve it” and that she didn’t step up when he needed her.
“When I got that note I was done,” Lewis says. “I realized in that moment… I gotta get out of here. I can’t do this anymore… I cannot work in a field that does not value me at the basic human level.”
Lewis is now a self-employed artist and says she makes more money now than she did teaching. All three women say that they likely won’t return to the education profession.
