It took Meaghan Gardena one year to decide that being a public high school teacher wasn’t for her.
The COVID-19 pandemic made the 2020-2021 school year a difficult time to be a first-time teacher. Gardena was teaching Spanish at Kearsarge Regional High School, although most of her experience was in teaching English and English as a Second Language. She was taking work home almost every night, trying to stay on top of the hybrid instruction model, while finishing a master’s degree, her student loans looming in the background.
Gardena said it wasn’t as much her own struggles that spurred her decision to leave as much as it was watching her older colleagues struggle. She realized that the job she had signed up for wasn’t going to get easier.
“I knew I was going to have a hard time because I hadn’t taught Spanish before. It was my first year,” Gardena said. “But there were veteran teachers that were struggling just as much as I was.”
Outside of school, Gardena noticed a lot of anger directed at teachers online – blaming them for school COVID policies, accusing them of secretly teaching critical race theory – which was disheartening during her first year on the job.
“It seemed like whenever I read an article about teaching or education, the comments were full of, like, ‘get teachers back in the classroom,’ ‘they’re so lazy,’ ‘they’re not doing their work,’” Gardena said. “Nobody wants to work in a field where everyone is out to get you. Or believes the worst of you.”
After observing many normalized aspects of public school teaching jobs – evenings and weekends spent working, summers prepping to work, constant new systems to learn and new initiatives to implement – Gardena realized it wasn’t what she wanted for the rest of her life.
“As I’ve finished college myself and I’ve worked with people who do work in other fields, I’m realizing ‘wow, all these other fields make way more money than teachers do, and have better work-life balance, that sounds really nice,’” Gardena said. “I love teaching, I love working with the kids, that was never an issue. But there is greener grass and other places.”
Gardena made the decision to leave her district in the summer of 2021, after one year of teaching. Since then, she’s been working as an adjunct English instructor at NHTI, and in the college’s tutoring center to make the job full-time, but is looking for other options.
Still, the majority of New Hampshire educators have chosen to keep their jobs, which offer predictable raises each year as teachers move to the next step on the salary scale, summers and holidays off, a good pension and strong union protection.
The average teacher salary in Merrimack County was about $58,000 in the 2021-2022 school year according to Department of Education data, ranging from Concord’s average teacher salary of $78,713 to Hill’s average teacher salary of $43,786. The average minimum starting salary was about $39,000, ranging from Concord’s teacher starting salary of $45,816 to Pittsfield’s starting salary of $32,794.
But for some, working through the COVID-19 pandemic was a tipping point – the final straw in their decision to leave the field or retire early from a job that many say is defined by long hours, few support resources and increasing responsibilities.
While there’s no numerical evidence that New Hampshire teachers are leaving their jobs in droves like many retail and hospitality employees during the Great Resignation, it’s on their minds. In late March, the Concord Monitor surveyed 200 teachers who had either left the field in the last four years or are seriously considering leaving. Many respondents cited burnout, lack of support from administrators, worsening student behavior issues in their schools and political tension in their communities as reasons why they left or were seriously considering leaving.
The day former Hollis English teacher Heidi Foster decided to leave teaching, it was June 2021 and temperatures were in the 90s. Working in a building that had no air conditioning, Foster purchased fans for her classroom using her own money. But the influx of students returning to in-person learning combined with COVID-19 distancing protocols meant the students could no longer fit in her usual classroom. They relocated to another room, which was also equipped with fans, but outside the direct path of the airflow. With mandated masks, the heat was brutal.
Before the end of the class, Foster found herself in the nurse’s office with heat exhaustion, so groggy she could not remember her husband’s phone number to call for a ride home. One of the high schoolers in the class also ended up in the nurse’s office with heat exhaustion.
“That kind of got through, like, ‘what am I doing?’” Foster recalled. “I remember saying to my husband that night, ‘I need a divorce from my job.’ Physically, emotionally, psychologically, I cannot keep doing this.”
Foster decided to leave when the school year ended later that month. Foster, 57, thought she would be dedicating at least eight more years to teaching, but the lack of work-life balance was taking its toll on her mental health, she said. Every afternoon, night and weekend she was working on curriculum, grading, feedback and planning for the week ahead. Summer break was spent analyzing student feedback from the previous year, updating her offerings to stay current and planning for the year ahead.
“I used to be a really interesting person, lots of hobbies and things that I enjoyed doing,” Foster said. “All of that fell away when I became a teacher. There was no room for anything else. Slowly you realize, ‘I can’t spend time with my parents,’ ‘I can’t spend time with my grandchild,’ I want to be a person, not just a teacher. The system is kind of designed where you have to choose. You can’t do it all.”
Foster said most people don’t understand the sheer number of things teachers are responsible for managing in an average school day – the number of decisions they are making every minute. In each class, Foster had to think about each individual student’s academic progress in reading, writing, grammar, public speaking and listening skills, but she also needed to monitor the social dynamics, scanning for signs that a student is being bullied or having trouble at home. She would contact counselors if a student seemed “off,” and had to keep an eye on those with medical needs, all while being aware of the latest emergency drills and active shooter trainings.
“When you have over 100 students on your caseload there is only so much you can do, but the expectations just keep going up,” Foster said.
Foster said she didn’t feel supported, wasn’t often asked how she was doing, and if she needed something – like a fan – she had to provide it herself.
“You have to listen to people when they are being crushed by the expectations, and I often felt there wasn’t room for that,” Foster said.
For teachers who do choose to leave the field due to burnout, especially those later in their careers, it isn’t an easy decision. Many end up returning to education, either because they miss it or because they need the money. One year after leaving Hollis Foster is getting ready to start a new job teaching English at Nashua High School South, after realizing she missed working with students. She said she was highly selective in her job search this time around, and picked a place where she felt she would be supported and was excited about the school culture.
Ryan Buchanan, who was student-teaching eighth-grade science in Manchester as part of his SNHU graduate-level teacher prep program, made the decision to leave his job and the program in December 2021. While there were other personal factors involved in his choice to stop working at that time, Buchanan, 36, said the political climate for teachers in New Hampshire played a major role in his decision to stop pursuing an education career in the Granite State.
Buchanan, who has also worked as a substitute teacher in Concord, loved teaching – he always did a “weird science fact” of the day, bought Lego spaceships to decorate the classroom, and incorporated Dungeons & Dragons games into his math classes to teach probability, a choice that labeled him “the D&D teacher” for the rest of the year. He said seeing the “aha” moment when students finally understood a concept, always made him feel “like a million bucks.”
In June 2021, Gov. Chris Sununu signed the state budget including a rider bill that contained the “Freedom from Discrimination in Education” law. Originally intended to ban certain “divisive concepts” in schools, the new law prohibits teaching that groups of people are inherently superior, oppressive or racist because of “immutable characteristics” like race, gender, and sexual orientation. Critics of the law say it was meant to restrict public school teachers from discussing topics like systemic racism and white privilege and that its vagueness has a chilling effect on teaching about discrimination in all its forms.
Empowered by the new law, the Department of Education created a web page with a form where parents can report teachers for alleged violations. Teachers found to have been in violation may be stripped of their teaching credentials. Days later, conservative group Moms for Liberty New Hampshire issued a Tweet offering a $500 bounty to the first person who “catches” a teacher violating the law.
For Buchanan, who was a state representative from 2018-2020 and was already dissatisfied with the level of school funding by the state and efforts to pare back resources for public education, this felt like the last straw. Buchanan, who is white, says he and his wife, who is Black, want their two biracial sons to be educated about slavery and racism in school without restrictions.
“When you have your kid being taught this revisionist history, when you have them gloss over the darker parts of American history, you lose,” Buchanan said. “My kids are losing part of their identity because they’re not being taught that.”
The debate over what should and should not be taught in schools hasn’t been limited to the state level. For the last several years, parents and community members have been vocal at school board meetings and in the community, with opinions over how schools teach topics like history, race, gender and reproductive health.
Buchanan said there was even discussion at his Manchester school about whether teaching the science of evolution would be considered “divisive” among families.
“As a teacher, having to worry that a parent is going to come in and go, ‘you taught about evolution and we don’t believe in that, I’m taking you to this panel where we’re going to judge if you get to still make your living doing the thing that you went to school for,’ it’s stressful,” Buchanan said. “And the job’s already very stressful.”
Buchanan and his family sold their Concord home and moved to Massachusetts in early August. It was a bittersweet decision because while he and his wife believe their sons will receive a better education and services in Massachusetts, he really loved teaching.
“I thought for sure this was what I was going to do for the next 30 years until I retired,” Buchanan said. He is currently taking a break from working while he decides what to pursue next.
Michael Whaland, Superintendent of Madison, Tamworth and Freedom school districts, has done extensive research on teacher retention in New Hampshire’s rural areas.
Whaland started his career as a teacher in Lancaster. Having grown up in Bow, he was unsure of how long he’d stay in the rural town in northwestern New Hampshire, but he ended up falling in love with the community and the accessibility of hiking and skiing, and stayed for 10 years. During that time he watched a lot of colleagues come and go, staying for just a few years before leaving for other opportunities.
“I saw a lot of people leaving in my community and was wondering why,” Whaland said. “I saw the impact that was having on the investment that the town and the school was putting into these individuals. We’re training them and they’re going somewhere else and we’re starting all over with someone else.”
Retention became the subject of his doctoral thesis at Plymouth State University in 2020. Whaland organized focus groups with educators at K-6 schools in the Great North Woods, the White Mountains, and Dartmouth/Lake Sunapee regions, to discuss what made them stay in their district. He also interviewed school leadership and read union contracts, meeting minutes, Department of Education data, school budget voting history and local newspaper articles to get a sense of the school climate and culture.
Whaland found that having a supportive school climate, competitive regional salaries and positive engagement with families in the community are all indicators that teachers are likely to stay in a district. A lack of these things leads to the feelings many area teachers experienced through COVID – burnout, feeling underpaid for the extra labor they were doing and being criticized by people in the community and political leaders over COVID-19 protocols and curriculum content.
“When we’re talking about the way teachers have had to step up, not having enough sub coverage, the implications of reopening plans, the extra steps to reach students remotely, to make sure we’re checking in and keeping in touch with our students but still not being able to do all the fun things because of social distancing,” Whaland said. “That wears on job satisfaction. This isn’t the school that they may have started teaching at. It looks very, very different.”
When teachers are experiencing all the elements of a positive workplace including supportive, understanding and consistent leadership and positive engagement with families, they are more likely to stay through challenging times like COVID-19, and are even willing to forego higher salaries offered by other districts.
“Community relationships is one of those things that I really don’t think you can put a price tag on,” Whaland said. “If teachers feel supported, appreciated and there’s that strong culture and climate in the building, that has strong value and they’re willing to stay in place.”
Whaland believes that moving forward, creating opportunities for the community to interact with the school is essential, whether it’s a new students’ night, a Friday night sports game or a spaghetti dinner that builds positive relationships.
“The past couple of years, it’s really isolated our ability to engage as a school and community,” Whaland said. “It’s made teaching a little more isolating. Those abilities to build relationships, especially with new families has been difficult and that impacts building trust and strong rela tionships with our families and community.”