Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Teacher exodus taking toll on schools, community

WEEKEND EDITION: June 8, 2003

Desert Pines High School teacher Molly McCormick packed up her stapler, pencils and a laminated list of American presidents.

Colorful world history posters were pulled from the walls, the textbooks stacked and the desk drawers checked one last time.

"The room looks so empty," McCormick said Wednesday, moments after she dismissed her last class as a Clark County School District employee. "I don't think it's sunk in yet that I'm actually leaving for good."

McCormick went back to her native state of Missouri on Friday, her green 1998 Toyota Carolla loaded up with everything she could fit inside. From there she'll await word from the school district in Dallas where she hopes to start a new job in the fall.

"I'm not naive, I never expected to make a huge salary," said McCormick, who earned $26,847 as a first-year teacher in Clark County. "But it's really disheartening to work 14-, 16-hour days and come home and not be able to pay your bills. I made more when I waited tables at Joe's Crab Shack."

Others will be following McCormick out the schoolhouse door.

Over the past three years, one out of every eight Clark County School District teachers quit the classroom, a turnover rate that has administrators scurrying for explanations as well as solutions.

The exodus is having a dramatic effect on everything from student achievement to the district's bottom line, educators say.

"When teachers drift in and out it takes a terrible toll on the whole community," said Martha Young, associate dean of the College of Education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "If kids don't think their teachers care enough to stay, how will they ever come to value learning?"

For the past two years, Clark County School District has hired more than 1,600 new teachers -- about half of those replace employees who leave, while the other half are needed to staff new schools.

In 2002, the district lost 1,300 teachers, nearly 10 percent percent of its licensed personnel. Of those who left, 263 were new hires, said George Ann Rice, associate superintendent of human resources.

In a report released in January by the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, researchers found low salaries, lack of support from school administrators, student discipline problems and a lack of teacher input into school decision-making were the top reasons cited by exiting teachers across the country.

The report also found close to a third of all new teachers left the classroom after three years and nearly 50 percent left after five years.

Recent studies shows Clark County's teacher turnover rate isn't far from the national average of about 15 percent. What sets the county apart from the rest of the country is the uneven distribution of newer teachers versus veterans.

According to the Clark County Education Association, about 50 percent of the disrict's teachers have five or fewer years of experience -- compared with the national average of about 12 percent.

Just 14 percent of the district's teachers are in the six- to 15-year range, while the remaining 36 percent are veteran teachers with more than 15 years on the job.

The loss of newer, younger employees is especially frustrating in Clark County, Rice said, because those are teachers the district desperately needs to keep up with the soaring student enrollment.

"When we lose a teacher, we lose the money and time we invested in them for recruiting, mentoring and training," Rice said. "The individual school has also lost a player on their team, a player that we then have to go out and try to replace."

It also puts additional strain on the teachers who stay, said John Jasonek, executive director of the education association, which represents most of the district's 14,500 teachers.

"When you have all that turnover at the beginning, it means you're not seeing teachers move into that middle range of experience," Jasonek said. "And it's the middle range we lean on to mentor younger teachers. You can't pass the torch if there's no one to hand off to."

Creative recruiting

The district has taken creative approaches to recruiting -- and keeping -- teachers, from successfully lobbying for a state-funded $2,000 signing bonus to setting up an online job bank so that spouses of new hires can search for work in other fields.

McCormick was one of those promising recruits -- a University of Missouri graduate with a degree in education, boundless energy and an obvious devotion to her students, Desert Pines Principal Roger Jacks said.

"We hate to see her go, although I can certainly understand why she feels that she needs to," Jacks said. "I can't come up with a lot of arguments to make someone stay when they tell me new teachers in Texas are making $8,000 more than they do here."

McCormick, 23, said she has student loans to pay and at the end of the month was struggling to pay all her bills.

She said spent about $500 of her own money providing her students with supplies and photo copying entire chapters of material to make up for the lack of textbooks in the classroom.

"I think after a few weeks I realized if I didn't give them paper and pens, they weren't going to do any work that day," McCormick said. "I didn't mind buying the stuff, I mean, it's $1.50 for a box of pens, but it begins to add up."

Unlike McCormick, new teacher Adam Patai says he'll be back in the fall, although not to Mojave High School in North Las Vegas where he taught this year. Instead he's switching to Liberty High School in the district's southeast region, one of 12 campuses opening in the fall.

Patai, whose wife will be returning to her teaching job at Roy Martin Middle School in Las Vegas, said he knows at least a half-dozen first-year teachers who are either heading back to their home states or taking jobs in other districts.

The blame for high teacher turnover should fall to the state Legislature, not the district, Patai said.

Schools do the best they can with the money they are allotted, but classrooms often lack enough textbooks to go around, and teachers must dip into their own pockets to provide students with basic supplies, he said.

"It's not just salaries, but the per-pupil funding that needs to go up," Patai said. "If Nevada wants to keep its teachers then the state is going to have to really take a stand and make education a priority."

Young, who places dozens of students from UNLV's teacher training program into county classrooms each year, said the reasons behind the turnover haven't changed much in the 30 years since she taught high school.

For some there's a mismatch between their perception of what teaching will be and the reality, Young said.

"A lot of young teachers have an idealized vision of the job, that their classroom will be filled with the kind of engaged and interested students they probably were themselves at one point," Young said. "The reality can be very different when you're facing a room crammed with 40 kids."

There's also county's demographics to contend with, Young said. The district is now a "minority majority," with whites accounting for less than half of the district's more than 258,000 students.

Because turnover tends to be higher at urban schools with high minority populations, those are the campuses with the staff openings filled by new teachers, Young said.

"We see a lot of young teachers with no prior experience dealing with kids from cultural backgrounds different from their own," Young said. "Even if the kids speak English, there are still issues and concerns that require teachers have some level of familiarity."

Before she arrived for her first day at Desert Pines, McCormick had little familiarity with a large, urban campus. With a high percentage of Hispanic students, many of whom speak limited English, McCormick often found herself relying on her bilingual students to serve as translators.

"It took some getting used to," McCormick said. "We just don't have schools like this back in St. Louis."

She said there were days when she wondered if she was making a difference for any of the students.

Pressure mounts

And the pressure on teachers to perform is only mounting, Young said. The federal No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in 2002, calls for tougher standards for teacher accreditation, individual student achievement and annual yearly progress by schools. For the first time, special-education students and students for whom English is not their first language must also show gains.

"We're moving into an era where your success as a teacher will be measured by how many of your kids pass a standardized exam," Young said. "If you don't meet that pass rate, regardless of the reasons why, you'll be seen as a failure. That's a tremendous pressure to put on someone in a helping profession."

The Washoe County School District has had good success in retaining new teachers, said Laura Dancer, associate superintendent of human resources for the state's second-largest district.

Washoe's annual teacher turnover rate is about 5 percent, less than half that of Clark and a third of the national average. Dancer attributed the low rate -- particularly among teachers in their first three years on the job -- to an aggressive mentoring program.

New teachers are paired up with mentors for their first two years, and also take part in ongoing training seminars and workshops, Dancer said. Those factors make it more likely that the teacher will be confident and capable, which in turn translate into classroom successes, she said.

"We make a real commitment to mentoring right from when they're hired," Dancer said. "We want them to know we're backing them up even before they get their first class of students."

Of the 200 teachers who quit Washoe County schools last year, 31 percent said low pay was behind their departure, while 29 percent cited working conditions as their reason for leaving, Dancer said.

Some turnover is necessary in any field, said Richard Ingersoll, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education.

"There are some people who shouldn't be teaching, and bringing in new blood can be a healthy thing," said Ingersoll, considered one of the nation's experts in teacher-staffing issues. "The question you have to ask is are the ones leaving the same people we should be weeding out, or are they the ones we want to keep?"

While the exit rate was once attributed to the "graying of the profession," the cause is now believed to be more about job dissatisfaction among younger teachers than a high number of teachers retiring, Ingersoll said.

Too many school districts are focusing solely on recruiting -- and ignoring the underlying problems causing teachers to leave in the first place, hel said.

In a 2001 report, Ingersoll first described the nation's growing teacher retention crisis a "bucket rapidly losing water because of holes in the bottom," an image that has since been appropriated by numerous educational policymakers and researchers.

"Pouring more water into the bucket won't solve anything if you don't plug the holes," Ingersoll said in a telephone interview with the Sun. "It's a self-defeating cycle if all you're doing is going out and getting new teachers, pouring them in and watching them drain away."

Deborah Slauzis, principal of Lynch Edison Elementary School in North Las Vegas, said she doesn't need a study to convince her that turnover hurts.

"If you're always going back to square one you never build up the momentum to move forward," said Slauzis, who is losing 32 of her 67 teachers.

"It's frustrating to not be able to count on that strong core of stability, not just for the classroom activities but for the school community as a whole."

The turnover is especially difficult for Lynch because it is one of seven Clark County schools managed by Edison Schools Inc., Slauzis said. It takes some teachers a while to get used to following Edison's regimented curriculum schedule and adopting the required instructional methods, she said.

"High turnover means we're never getting to the point that our entire staff has developed a facility and comfort level with the programs," Slauzis said. "That makes it difficult to see if we're really getting results from our students."

Even at schools following the standard school district curriculum, teacher turnover can mean the difference between success and failure, said Moises Denis, Nevada PTA treasurer.

"A stable teaching staff means a stable school environment," Denis said. "I realize some turnover is bound to happen, but what we're seeing right now at a lot of our schools is really out of control."

Terry Harper, a junior at Desert Pines, said he's used to having a teacher for a single year and then never seeing her again. He had hoped McCormick would stay so that he could visit her in the fall, but wasn't surprised when she told his world history class she would be leaving.

"I don't think a lot of kids here don't care about learning," Harper said. "The teachers really have to work hard to get them to pay attention or do anything. I wouldn't want that job."

McCormick said if it weren't for the financial pressures, she would likely stay at Desert Pines.

"Overall, I've been extremely happy here," said McCormick who was nominated for the best new teacher of the year award in the district by her colleagues. "Every day was a challenge, but I know I'm leaving here a better teacher."

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