How do you explain to a classroom of 22 first graders why they have to practice hiding in the dark crouched near a filing cabinet away from door windows?
Teacher Keri Gordon tries with the gentlest of words, reassuring her young learners at Denver’s Doull Elementary School that she will use her body to shield them should an intruder burst into their classroom.
“These 6-year-olds are looking at you and you’re doing a lockdown drill and you’re trying to explain, ‘Just in case someone wanted to come into our building and hurt us, we have to hide, we have to be quiet, we have to hide,’” Gordon says, her voice choking with emotion. “They don’t understand, and it brings them to tears, and I’m telling them, ‘If someone ever tried to hurt you, I would get in their way. I will protect you.’”
“Who knew teaching would be such a dangerous profession, huh?” she asks.
Fears around school safety are one of the chronic sources of stress that follow teachers into the classroom — where many also take on extra responsibilities because of staff shortages, try to nurture students through mental health struggles while also coping with their own and power through vocal outside critics who pick apart their approaches to teaching lessons on politically charged issues like gender identity, race and history. The stress doesn’t end with the school day: Many go home and try to figure out how to make ends meet for their families with pay that lags drastically behind other professions.
All those challenges are spelled out in an annual State of Education report published Wednesday by the Colorado Education Association, which — similar to previous years — urges state lawmakers to invest more in public education while continuing to sound the alarm on teachers’ escalating levels of stress and growing list of demands.
“While our educators are really doing great things, showing up every day to support our students, they’re still feeling a lot of stressors and pressure in the system right now,” CEA President Amie Baca-Oehlert told The Colorado Sun, noting that the latest report amplifies concerns raised by the statewide teachers in recent years.
Educators are “asking for a lifeline,” Baca-Oehlert said. “They’re saying to us, ‘This is what’s happening in our profession. Work with us. Help us make things better for our students and our public schools.’”
Approaching “the brink of crisis”
Among the most alarming findings: 58% of survey respondents said they are considering leaving education in the near future — slightly better than two years ago, when 67% of educators indicated they were thinking about leaving the classroom. Additionally, 65% of respondents don’t trust the state’s current school accountability system, which is intended to measure how well teachers are educating students across schools, largely through standardized test scores. That system could undergo changes after facing severe scrutiny from educators and administrators across Colorado as a task force convenes to recommend ways to improve how the state gauges school quality.
And 85% of survey respondents noted that politically divisive issues have affected their feelings about working in education and eroded their sense of morale. Meanwhile, 66% of respondents said they have experienced “a substantial deterioration” in their mental health during the past few years while 70% have seen students’ mental health suffer significantly.
CEA’s report largely consists of input collected in the fall. Its nearly 40,000 members across Colorado include teachers and other school staff members, such as counselors, social workers, school nurses, bus drivers, food service workers and paraprofessionals.
CEA opens with a plea to state leaders, saying that “years of neglect have brought our public education system, along with our students and educators, to the brink of crisis.”
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They want legislators “to prioritize the substantive, systemic funding changes that are necessary for fully funded schools to secure a brighter future for our state.”
Lawmakers and Gov. Jared Polis have proposed funding schools to the level required by the state constitution for the first time in 14 years, but educators and school funding advocates are firm that schools will still need more money to be adequately funded.
A long-term school funding deficit stemming from the economic downturn of the Great Recession has deprived schools of about $10 billion in state funding. One of the major consequences of the funding shortfall: teacher pay that simply hasn’t kept pace with the compensation of other professions requiring a college degree. A report published last year by Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit think tank the Economic Policy Institute found that Colorado teachers earn 35.9% less than other college-educated workers — the worst gap in the country.
For many educators, meager wages have led to mounting hardships with being able to afford to live where they teach. Half of respondents in CEA’s survey indicated that they’ve found it challenging to afford housing in the past year.
Gordon, of Doull Elementary School, lives in a home in Highlands Ranch with her husband and children, and she works a second job so that they can manage rising costs of property taxes, gas, groceries and extracurricular activities for their kids.
“We’re working very hard and to feel like it’s not enough and there’s a financial burden there because we aren’t compensated I don’t believe competitively with other professions that require that level of effort and passion and devotion,” said Gordon, now in her 19th year in the classroom. “I just sometimes feel like it would certainly be easier if I were able to just have one income and enjoy my family.”
I just sometimes feel like it would certainly be easier if I were able to just have one income and enjoy my family.
— Keri Gordon, First-grade teacher at Doull Elementary in Denver
Staff shortages strain teachers but many choose to stay for students
Teacher and staff shortages that gained momentum at the height of the pandemic continue to rock classrooms and stretch teachers’ workloads.
According to CEA, none of Colorado’s 179 school districts were fully staffed at the start of the current school year. Last year, more than 9,700 teaching and education support positions were vacant — 15% of all teaching positions and 20% of all support positions in Colorado, the report states, citing data from the Colorado Department of Education.
The union asserts that Colorado isn’t battling a teacher shortage but instead has “a deficit of educators willing to work under untenable conditions” since CDE’s licensure system holds information for more than 130,000 licensed teachers and processes more than 40,000 new and renewing licensure applications every year.
Colleen O’Neil, associate commissioner of educator talent at the state education department, acknowledges that Colorado has struggled to retain many of its teachers, with turnover ranging from 14% to 18% each year for the last decade.
“That’s a lot of turnover, and it is definitely increasing,” O’Neil said. “It has not decreased in the last several years. And so if we’re losing our teachers at the same rate we’re bringing them in or more than even, that’s creating a shortage.”
However, there are specific content areas, such as special education, that simply lack enough qualified educators in the state, and many teachers are retiring earlier, she added.
Teacher retention challenges, O’Neil said, largely stem from culture issues in schools.
“We are putting more money into teacher recruitment and retention than we ever have in the state of Colorado,” she said. “And we’re seeing small pockets of success with that, but we also are seeing teachers continuing to leave education. That means that it is not about the money or the systems or the processes that we’re putting in place at a state level always. I think it is truly about that culture.”
When teachers have to defer to local or state policies instead of relying on their own decisions and expertise to help students learn in the ways they’re trained, it gives educators little incentive to stay, O’Neil said.
But many educators have chosen to keep teaching, and O’Neil sees them come alive when she visits their classrooms.
“When I’m side by side with a teacher, they are excited, happy with their kids,” she said. “They are energized because their kids are learning. They are investing their heart and soul into their profession, and they are getting better at it. They feel good about it. And when you take them out of the classroom and have bigger conversions, they are stressed and they are feeling this weight.”
Gordon has thought about leaving at different points of her career, but she has continued teaching because of the ways she gets to help shape young minds as they begin learning basic skills in reading, writing and math. She estimates that she’s worked with at least 400 kids throughout her nearly two decades in classes.
By the end of each school year, she can show students the leaps they’ve made in reading longer, more complex books.
“Their eyes light up,” Gordon said, “and I tell them that learning to read is a gift and you now have the gift and no one can take it from you. And you know that they feel it, and you know that you were a part of that. You taught someone how to read. That’s the best feeling ever.”
Emily Muellenberg, a social studies teacher at Grandview High School in Aurora, has never considered stopping teaching in her 19 years in education — 17 of which she spent in Douglas County Schools.
There are plenty of hard and overwhelming days, particularly as Muellenberg said it’s become more challenging to motivate kids to push themselves in classes. But there are just as many fun days, she added, and she is always happy to walk into a classroom full of students no matter how stressful her day.
That’s why she stays.
“It boils down to, it’s not what we do,” Muellenberg said, “but it really is who we are.”