2024-01-29 02:45:00
PARKERSBURG, W.Va. (WTAP) – Teachers across West Virginia are dissatisfied with their workplace, burnt out, and unsure how long they’ll stay in the profession, according to the most recent survey of members of the West Virginia Education Association.
Almost 3/4 of the 700 teachers surveyed said they were dissatisfied with their working conditions. 98% said they saw stress and burnout as a serious issue. And almost half said they were likely to leave the field earlier than they had planned.
WVEA President Dale Lee said these issues are exacerbated by widespread shortages in teaching and service personnel all over West Virginia. “I would submit to you that 1,705 positions, bus drivers having to do multiple runs, the lack of aides in classrooms, the lack of cooks — I would submit to you that is a crisis,” Lee said.
Lee said part of the issue leading to the vacancies, and to burnout and dissatisfaction, comes down to salary, with West Virginia recently dropping to 50th in the nation for teacher pay. “Our surrounding states are giving much more than $2,000 plus,” Lee said. “Tennessee, for example, raised beginning salary to $60,000 dollars, when our beginning salary is right around 40,000.”
Lee said an aggregate raise of 5% proposed by Gov. Jim Justice might be a good starting place to addressing the salary issue. But there’s no certainty at this point that the raise will be approved by lawmakers. And salary isn’t the only issue burdening teachers.
Corinne Full was a teacher in Wood County Schools for 15 years, spending most of that time as an English teacher at Parkersburg High School. Full was named the 2016/2017 Wood County teacher of the year. She left teaching in 2023.
Full said no one gets into teaching expecting it to be easy. “You know, teaching is a difficult profession,” she said. “And you’re doing the impossible every day. Like, you’re going to put me in a room with 30 different people, and you’re going to say, ‘They all have different learning styles, they’re all developmentally different. Get them to learn the same thing.’ But like, that’s a challenge I can take on. You know that as a teacher.”
Full said it’s things outside of those expected difficulties that contribute most to stress, burnout, and teachers leaving the profession. “Just constantly, laws and regulations and policies coming from the state all the way down to the individual school are being enacted that make your job harder, that don’t help the students at all, and you just, you just get tired of it. It’s easy to get burnt out.”
Full said a big part of the problem is that policymakers aren’t accounting for changing needs in the student population. She said teachers are increasingly having to deal with personal and behavioral issues with students beyond what can reasonably be expected of them.
“As schools, we don’t really have all the tools that we need to fix that, and we just keep saying the schools will fix it because the kids are there,” Full said. “And so then, teachers become teacher, social worker, parent, you know, nutritionist, everything. And at some point, it will break you. Because you can’t be all of those things to 160 kids a day. That’s not possible”
Full said this overburdening of teachers reflects bigger institutional issues in education and social systems in West Virginia. “There’s not a system in place to help those kids who need more than what we can offer,” she said “They need more structure than maybe a traditional classroom. Because a traditional classroom — you can leave, go to the bathroom, and never come back, right? They need more structure than that, there’s not systems in place, and the systems that are in place, there’s such gatekeeping to get kids into them because they’re not big enough, you know, alternative schools, things like that, they’re not big enough.”
Full said solving these issues means making more resources available to teachers and students, like social workers and psychologists.
Dale Lee said fixing these bigger behavioral issues also means intervening as soon as possible. He pointed to “innovation zones.” These were alternative settings within schools that existed at some West Virginia schools in the early 2010s that might cater to students with different behavioral issues. “When we did that in these pilot schools, we saw a 74% decrease in the number of discipline referrals, and a 72% increase in academics,” Lee said. “So it works.”
State funding for innovation zones ended in 2016.
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