Today, a 20-acre stretch of green space known as “Shy installation” remains an active school campus in East Austin. But soon, the Austin Independent School District will turn it into an apartment complex to house teachers and staff who are increasingly left out of the urban Texas district.
The goal is to create at least 500 new rental units on the site, alleviating (if not solving) the housing burden that many of the district’s 10,000 staff members say they face.
Dozens of districts across the country are pursuing similar projects, as a lack of affordable housing in some parts of the United States has led teachers to endure long commutes, turn down job offers and leave their jobs altogether.
This year, EdSurge has been reporting on the relationship between America’s housing crisis and high teacher turnover rates in K-12 education.
In our first story, we explore the impact of rising housing costs on the teacher shortage by visiting a rural mountain community where this crisis is unfolding in real time. Next, we highlight a school district in the San Francisco Bay Area where an affordable housing complex built on district-owned land and occupied exclusively by teachers and school staff is already showing signs of success.
Over the past six months, we have spoken with teachers and school support staff in rural and urban districts whose modest salaries do not keep up with the housing prices in their communities. We’ve interviewed education researchers, district leaders, and economists about what both the data and anecdotal evidence reveal about these dynamics. We have scoured local and state news sources, case studies, and reports to understand the different solutions being proposed and implemented. And we took two informational trips to visit school districts that are considering, or have already begun, construction of staff housing projects.
These are the key takeaways from our reports:
1. The rising cost of housing is driving teachers and support staff out of their schools and communities.
The costs of both rent and buy have increased dramatically since the pandemic and teacher salaries have not been able to keep pace with that growth rate. In areas where housing prices and the cost of living are especially high, turnover rates have reached alarming levels.
The Jefferson Union High School District, located in the San Francisco Bay Area, had been losing 20 to 25 percent of its staff annually before opening an apartment complex on district-owned land last year.
“We keep hearing, ‘It’s not because we don’t want to work here. It’s because we can’t live here,’” says Austin Worden, the district’s director of staff communications and accommodations.
In Colorado’s Eagle County School District, turnover hovers around 20 percent annually. “We continue to have staff shortages in all departments,” shares a district official.
In both boroughs, the median sales price of a home is over $1 million, and rental rates for a one-bedroom apartment can easily cost $2,000 a month or more.
In Austin, Texas, as newcomers flock to the city and housing prices soar, many educational staff are pushed further into the suburbs. Some will eventually be forced to leave the district or seek higher-paying professions.
“More than half of my salary goes to rent and living expenses… A lot of us are quitting because of that,” an Austin ISD staff member shared in a district survey conducted earlier this year, which found that 74 per cent of staff spend more than 30 per cent of their salary on housing.
Another educator wrote that while his salary increased 8 percent the previous year, his rent increased 22 percent. “This is not sustainable and will eventually drive me out of the city where I teach.”
2. In many areas, teachers can’t afford to rent or buy, and the data backs up the anecdotes.
Earlier this year, Patricia Saenz-Armstrong, senior economist at the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), analyzed housing costs in 69 large metropolitan areas in all 50 states versus teacher salaries in districts largest schools in those areas, then published his findings in a report.
In 15 of 69 metropolitan areas, it found that renting a one-bedroom apartment would be unaffordable for an early-career teacher (where “affordability” is defined using the US Department of Housing and Urban Development scale). . definition). And in six of those metropolitan areas, it would take a teacher at least 20 years to save enough money for the average down payment on a home.
A prohibitively high cost of living is not limited to cities. In regions across the country, from California to North Carolina (including resort communities like Eagle County), renting and buying can be a difficult task, especially for public school teachers, for whom national legislation average salary It’s about $67,000.
3. The resulting turnover rates impact students and school communities.
The stakes are high. When a school district must replace one in five staff members each year (as would be the case in a district with a 20 percent annual turnover rate), educators, students, families and the entire community are are affected.
“You lose skills and capacity in a school when you keep bringing in new teachers who don’t have experience,” says Heather Peske, president of NCTQ. “When teachers leave, (their) knowledge and skills and the investments that districts have made go out the door. “The district has to start over with a new generation of teachers.”
Over time, students in high-turnover districts often are taught by less experienced and less qualified teachers. This has a cumulative impact, especially when investigation shows that teachers have a greater influence on student achievement than any other school factor.
“If every year the campus staff looks different, that really impacts that campus and how it functions,” acknowledges Jeremy Striffler, director of real estate for Austin ISD. “We also know that if we can’t fill positions, there is the threat of larger class sizes, there is the threat of school closures, etc. Therefore, we must do everything we can to attract and retain employees.”
4. Desperate to curb attrition, school districts are getting involved.
District leaders may not be prepared to spearhead housing development projects. But desperate times call for desperate measures.
“They don’t have the time or luxury to think, ‘Is this my job?’” Peske says, adding that the responsibility of district leaders is to ensure a stable and effective teaching workforce.
Some have tried to appeal to their communities. In Eagle County and elsewhere, district leaders have asked the owners open their homes to educators, allowing them to rent spare rooms and loft-style garages. A district in Arizona construction recently started in a project to build small houses for teachers. One in Texas I bought a motelrenting the rooms at a deeply discounted rate to district staff with housing problems.
The most popular answer, however, is what districts in Austin, Eagle County and the Bay Area are doing: building housing complexes on district-owned land.
Many school districts are land rich and are beginning to take advantage of that asset. Only in California, at least 46 school districts They were carrying out worker housing projects starting in March 2022.
Across the country, district-led efforts to provide housing for teachers are in various stages. The Jefferson Union High School District staff housing complex opened more than a year ago. Early results indicate that it is working as designed; Staff vacancies have decreased and retention has increased. Through a lottery system, Eagle County Schools recently matched staff with units at its next apartment building, which will be available in phases starting this fall. For those who were matched, it is ready to change the rules of the game. But there are not enough units to serve all the educators who expressed need.
Austin’s plans are not so mature. Construction has not yet begun, and Striffler estimates it is years before staff can move into the final building.
“We just feel like we have these assets here, we have this underutilized land, and we can put it to good use by building housing, which can hopefully keep our teachers and staff here in the community that they serve,” Strifler said. he says.
These efforts will help alleviate housing problems for many educators, but are unlikely to completely remedy the problems, district leaders admit.
“I don’t know if it will ever be resolved,” says Eagle County Schools spokesman Matthew Miano, “but we’ll continue to fix it.”
