Teachers wanted: Passion a must, patience required, pay negligible

OAKLAND, Calif. — By 9 a.m. on August 19, the first day of work for teachers in Oakland, California, Kilian Betlach had already been busy for hours. Betlach, the principal of a small middle school called Elmhurst Community Prep in a neighborhood residents refer to as Deep East Oakland, had just finished a meeting about an upgrade to his school’s athletic fields. There were only three prep days before the school’s 374 students would arrive and there was still too much to do. But Betlach felt his team — 18 teachers, two administrators and a dozen support staff — was up to the challenge.

Teachers had come in that morning carrying posters, dry erase markers and cans of Coke to stock their classrooms. They’d come in hoping that this year they’d master work-life balance, this year their students would feel success, this year their classes would have a lasting impact. And they came in worrying, too. They worried about broken projectors, about the apparent gas leak in the sixth-grade wing, about not getting their first paycheck until the end of September and about the things that had happened to their students over the summer that they didn’t yet know about. In Deep East Oakland, summers can be dangerous.

Betlach, who is starting his seventh year as an administrator and his fourth as principal, had worries of his own last spring. Every year, he’s had to fill three to nine vacated teaching positions. Finding the right people to fill those spots isn’t easy. Nor is the emotional toll of the relentless turnover.

This fall, seven of the 18 teachers and the assistant principal are new to Elmhurst. “You wake up [in the night] and say, ‘If I can’t keep these people here, what am I doing?’” Betlach said.

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Photo Credit: Alison Yin/The Hechinger Report