Many years ago, when I was still in the private sector, I had my own failed start-up. It was an experience that I was glad to have had, but it was also one of the most painful experiences of my career. It was painful not because it ended up not working, but because the person who’d started the ball rolling, a former mentor who had recruited me away from the security of a lucrative, promising job with a company that had been good to me, bailed on us with little warning. Legal paperwork was required. Heated conversations followed. It felt like a divorce. It’s not an experience I enjoy revisiting.
I share this story because for anyone who has ever thought they’d finally reached just what they wanted from their career and then had the rug ripped from under them, you may be able to related to how SFUSD teachers are feeling these days.
That “divorce” was, at the time, and for a while after, the most painful professional experience I went through. It still didn’t prepare me for what it has felt like to leave SFUSD.
I didn’t want to leave the district. When I left the private sector, got my Masters, went through a year of training, and stuck with it through the pandemic it was because I wanted to make a difference for the students in my home town. Because I knew somehow that I could make a difference. And I like to think that for most of my students I was making a difference.
It wasn’t the hard work that ran me out of SFUSD. I left the district, not teaching.
It wasn’t the kids that ran me out of SFUSD. I miss them every day. I left the district, not my kids.
It wasn’t, as many people want to believe, the challenges of teaching in a community particularly impacted by the pandemic. Like I said, I’m still teaching, and with an equally harmed community. I left the district, not the challenges.
I left because the district was failing my students, my colleagues, and our community at seemingly every turn.
I left because I was exhausted by watching my colleagues panicked because payroll issues meant they couldn’t pay their bills. I was worn down by having to pour over my paycheck each month to check for errors and building my savings not to have savings, but in case the district just failed to pay me the next month.
I left because the district couldn’t figure out how to hire enough substitutes, and teachers were coming to work sick, or losing time for meetings about students and planning differentiated instruction to cover for colleagues.
I left because there are still schools without full-time nurses in SFUSD.
I left because I felt complicit in not meeting the spirit of my students’ IEPs, documents that should be legally binding but were being written in a way as to protect against surging case loads for Special Education teachers that are impossible to sustain.
I left because I was watching competent principal after competent principal being driven to the edge of their sanity trying to meet the needs of the school in front of them while playing by rules set by people making more than twice what my colleagues were making without a seeming connection to the reality we were experiencing.
I left because the district had poorly forecasted staffing needs over and over so that my school was working with a skeleton staff, at the expense of student success.
I left because teaching is one of the few jobs in our economy where you can’t “stick it out a couple more months and then decide.” You have to commit for a year, and if you can’t make it, you lose the license you worked so hard for and can’t work in the state anymore.
I left because colleagues who were having true mental health crises had to fight to be able to take medical leave and one was barred from moving to a school where they could have a hope of sustainability so was forced to move to a charter network.
I left because the veteran teachers who act as coaches and support for newer teachers and teachers not sure how to work in these unprecedented times were being forced out by vague policies that left them without any sense of their own futures with the district while the teachers they support were left on their own.
Finally, I left because after not having a contract for almost three years, as we all stood by and wondered if we’d finally have a contract that met the needs of our students, the district failed to negotiate in good faith, dragged their feet at every opportunity, and then came back with an embarrassing offer in response to ours with the promise that “we can talk about it again next year.”
I left the district in May, and it was the hardest and most emotional decision of my career. I told colleagues it felt like I was calling off an engagement where I still deeply loved the person but knew the marriage wouldn’t work.
I still love the students, teachers and staff of SFUSD deeply. I miss my kids every day. I’ve lost some of the connection to why I left the private sector and all its perks to begin with. I feel a sort of survivor’s guilt that they are left behind, working tirelessly in a city that doesn’t seem to love them back.
I’m sorry to those students and my former colleagues that I wasn’t strong enough to make it work. I’m saddened that I am just one in hundreds of stories of teachers who have and will leave the district, and I'm devastated for the students who will be left behind.
Please San Francisco. Take care of your teachers. They have been doing everything they can for your kids, don’t lose them too.
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