Teachers are facing rising levels of stress, burnout
Driving home one day in the fall of 2021 from her job as an art teacher at a low-income public charter school near Sacramento, Calif., Ruth Santer fell asleep at the wheel.
She often came home physically spent after a day of arriving early, wielding heavy art supplies and staying late to prepare art materials, all while managing a full classroom of middle school students. The work had always been strenuous but pandemic stresses had added to her level of exhaustion.
On that drive home, Santer, 63, struck another car, and though no one was harmed, she took the incident as a sign for her to leave her job a few years before her planned retirement. “There were a lot of factors but that was the moment when I said, ‘OK, I don’t think that this is safe or wise, to be this exhausted,’” she said.
Santer is far from alone. In a 2022 survey conducted by the National Education Association, 55 percent of educators said that they were thinking about leaving the profession, many of them citing pandemic-related difficulties and burnout.
Teachers must not only face long hours in a stressful environment, but also the rise of political debates around COVID policies and curriculums. Here are a few of their stories.
Ruth Santer
When the pandemic first began, Santer worked hard to figure out how to teach art remotely, but new issues emerged at the same time hybrid schooling did. In addition to the physical toll of her work, debates about masking, vaccines and gender identity entered the classroom, she said.
“There are always a lot of stresses in teaching because everyone feels like they know about it. Everyone’s gone to school, everyone has an
opinion about how it should be done.”
She quit, and after taking a short break, returned to her work as a graphic designer, a career where she had spent 25 years before becoming a teacher. Fortunately, Santer said, she’s covered under her husband’s health insurance and had recently finished paying off her home.
Though she feels she left at the right time, there are parts of her work that she misses, she
said. “I do miss my students’ inspiration. Their work really inspired me,” Santer said.
Thu Anh Nguyen
For Thu Anh Nguyen, 43, quitting her job meant having to transfer to her husband’s health insurance, which included significantly higher expenses than she was accustomed to while working as a sixth grade teacher at a private school in Washington, D.C. But the decision was worth it for the reduced stress she felt soon after quitting, she said.
“My husband said to me, ‘I don’t know that even health insurance is worth how miserable you are, because is it going to pay for all the therapy that you need for this?’” Nguyen said.
In addition to the stress and her lengthy commute, Nguyen was unhappy with the way the school had handled hybrid and in-person teaching during the pandemic, which she said only exacerbated the inequities she saw there.
“Whenever I brought up anything, I would get really easy and unsatisfying answers like, ‘Just take your kids outside,’ when I was talking about, like, our deep, existential threat,” she said.
Nguyen gave notice in November 2021 that she would be leaving at the end of that school year and is now a staff member at the National SEED Project, which trains leaders — many of them working in education — in ways to facilitate discussions of social justice. Her new job also has more flexibility and allows for more time to spend at home with her two children.
“It felt like no one was ever going to listen,” she said of her previous role.
Katie Newman
Katie Newman, 40, had wanted to become a teacher since she was a child. She began her career soon after graduating from college.
But after 16 years, the last five of which she had spent at a private coed Catholic school near her home in Seattle, she decided to leave her job, and is now a full-time parent to her two children, who are 3 and 6.
Contributing to her decision to leave were feelings of burnout and a constantly changing teaching structure, as well as a covenant containing anti-LGBTQ positions that the staff was required to sign, Newman said.