Bay Area Blues: Problems Finding New Teachers In The Bay Area
Kaz Murray | kmurray25@dtechhs.org
Mackenzie Chan | mjchan25@dtechhs.org
This school year, there has been a lot of fantastic new teachers at d.tech and in the Bay Area. But is it easy for educators to find employment? The answer: not quite.
As we know, the Bay Area is expensive, and even that is an understatement. Houses sell for an average of around $1.30 million. This is due to how close we are to tech companies, such as Facebook, Tesla, and Oracle, and how we live on a peninsula, which means less land. Given that teachers in the Bay Area are paid the national teacher average of around $65,000, a lot of teachers can’t live here just on their salary.
School Director Melissa Mizel, gives us an inside look into how these struggles are presented in our own school. “It can [be] hard. I think it can be challenging to live in the Bay Area with the high cost of living, and unfortunately, education doesn’t pay teachers enough to compete with folks in the tech industry,” Mizel says. Though the new teachers are great, the interview process was more difficult than usual. “Yep, we did it all on zoom.”
Even teachers at other schools face this issue. At Arroyo Upper Elementary in San Carlos, Jacey Phipps, a new 4th grade teacher, describes her own experience, “Due to COVID 19, a lot of schools didn’t post jobs until the 19-20 school year was almost over. That added a lot of stress as I was applying for jobs, and not seeing a lot of options,” she says. The principal of Arroyo, Mindy Shelton, agrees in the hiring process, “This year, we conducted our interviews over Zoom. It's not quite the same as in person because it's hard to make eye contact, etc. but it went okay.” Both educators can agree that the results are nothing but positive, though, as Shelton claims she’s very pleased with the teachers hired this year.
The fear of going back in the classroom after so long on Zoom was a universal fear that Phipps, and other teachers felt. “As a brand new teacher, I finished my Masters program during COVID, it has been difficult to find long term positions,” Long term substitute teacher, Summer De Mello, tells us about her struggle finding jobs after graduating during the pandemic. “Most schools want staff with experience, which is logical. However, to get that teaching experience, one must work somewhere.”
But not all new teachers, including Joe Schneider, one of the new Spanish teachers at d.tech, had a scuffle finding jobs. “It was surprisingly easy to find a job teaching in the Bay Area. After a year [of] student teaching virtually at a school in Sunnyvale to earn my credential, the interview and hiring processes were fairly straightforward,” he tells.
As students, it may be difficult to imagine the struggles of finding long term jobs, to earn money to pay bills for our houses and to feed ourselves on a certain budget. But for our teachers, who have come this far in terms of finding a stable teaching job in the Bay Area, it’s been proving harder now than ever.