Moonlighting up among financially strapped schoolteachers
About half of Texas educators supplement their incomes with summer employment
Summer traditionally is a time for teachers like Chris Williams to take a break after a busy and stressful school year, but this year he finds himself working to the point of exhaustion.
Monday through Thursday, Williams works 7½-hour days as an instructor at a summer school. Then he logs in another 15-20 hours on weeknights and weekends as a sales associate at the Barnes & Noble on West Gray near Shepherd.
“For me, if I did not have to work at Barnes & Noble or any kind of second job, I wouldn’t spend more summer time watching Netflix or at the beach,” Williams said. “I would really spend more of that time doing things that are reasons why I got into the profession in the first place — help students make connections.”
Williams and about half of Texas teachers take on summer jobs to help supplement their incomes, according to a survey funded by the Texas State Teachers Association.
Moonlighting, especially during the summer months, has long been a popular way for teachers to earn more money. But data indicate it has become more common, especially with the rise of the so-called freelance economy and service apps such as Uber and grocery-shopping services.
Williams said that without his second job, which he also works during the school year, he would be unable to live close to his job at Stephen F. Austin High School, east of downtown.
He said his book-selling gig provides him with about $400 or $500 extra a month, depending on his hours. He earns $54,000 teaching.
But his moonlighting presents Williams with a Catch-22: He took the bookstore job so he could live closer to his school and
“I would love to ... be more involved in the classroom and less involved at my retail job.” Chris Williams, teacher at Stephen F. Austin High School
spend more time with his students, but the second job keeps him too busy to spend more time with them during the school year.
“There are a lot of things I would like to do in school — starting clubs and organizations, and students have asked me to sponsor things,” Williams said. “I would love to do that and be more involved in the classroom and less involved at my retail job.”
Teachers wear a range of hats during the summer months: swim instructor, freelance writer, Uber driver, summer school instructor, camp counselor cashier, tax auditor, etc.
Many reasons for jobs
Dale Ballou, an associate professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University who has studied teacher moonlighting, stressed that teachers take on second jobs or summer work for a myriad of reasons, not just stagnant salaries and rising living costs.
“It’s definitely a mixed bag, but it’s certainly not true that all these teachers are working second jobs purely out of dire financial circumstances,” Ballou said. “A lot of teachers working second jobs are doing these fairly substantial activities — not just checking groceries at a local grocery store, but sometimes activities of a professional nature such as having a photo studio on the side.”
While salaries in the Houston area for the 201617 school year ranged from a low of $50,000 for a new teacher in the Spring Branch ISD to a high of $63,748 for teachers with more than 20 years of experience in Alief ISD, educators say it’s still difficult to make ends meet in the nation’s fifth-largest metropolitan area.
Gov. Greg Abbott announced he would ask state lawmakers in a special session this month to require that every teacher in the state get a $1,000 annual pay raise.
Abbott says local school districts should dip into their pockets to pay for the increases by reprioritizing how they spend and changing how they hire and retain teachers.
“Texas doesn’t need to spend more. We just need to spend smarter,” Abbott said.
With about 350,000 teachers in Texas, districts statewide would have to shell out $350 million annually if the Legislature orders such raises, according to the Texas Education Agency.
Last month, the Houston ISD’s board adopted a bud- get that would create a $160 million shortfall, in part, to give teachers pay raises ranging from 2-4 percent based on experience — less than the 5 percent acrossthe-board raises that teachers and advocates wanted.
A Texas Teachers Association survey last year found that 49 percent of teachers reported working over the summer while about 31 percent worked a second job during the academic year, up from 42 percent and 28 percent respectively in 2000.
Financial burdens
Elizabeth Santos recalled that when she went to work for the Houston ISD in 2008, she never thought she would have to take a summer job.
The 35-year-old English teacher at Northside High School said she took a second job as a Spanish and SAT tutor when she became pinched financially after her first year on the job.
But the stress on her finances grew after she gained custody of her niece and nephew, and she was unable to raise a family on her teacher’s salary alone.
Things are better now — Santos is engaged, and now her household has two incomes — but she will continue to spend her summer months working at Northside High.
“We’re still working in summer — any good teacher will be working on how to perfect their craft,” Santos said. “Financially it’s a burden. If I don’t work summer school, it’s not even that I won’t get ahead; I’ll just be making it. A lot of my peers are single moms, and it’s hard enough to be a teacher, but it’s even harder to be a teacher and single mom.”