As the school year came to a close all across Arkansas, teachers were making a decision.
Will they stay or will they go?
The end of the school year is also contract time for teachers. And many won't be returning to the classroom.
That's true for an alarming number of them. In fact, roughly one in three Arkansas teachers will leave the profession after just three years on the job, according to a report from the state Bureau of Legislative Research.
It takes teachers longer than that to get the degrees that allow them to teach. But, for many, the real job clearly didn't match expectations.
Also, fewer students are enrolling in teacher preparation programs, the report said, citing a 50 percent drop in the number of students enrolled in traditional programs from 2010 to 2015.
Even counting those in non-traditional teacher preparation programs, the number in the teaching pipeline was down more than 36 percent in that same time frame.
The report was prepared for House and Senate members on the Legislature's Interim Education Committee.
State lawmakers must regularly assess the adequacy of the public schools, including analysis of teacher salaries. This year they also looked more closely at teacher recruitment and retention issues in Arkansas.
Salaries are part of the increasingly serious turnover problem, but there are other issues as well.
Since the 2006-07 school year, the report said, an average of 15 percent of new teachers do not return to the classroom after their first year of teaching. After three years, the percentage of teachers who quit more than doubles to 31 percent. By the fifth year, more than 36 percent are gone.
Why do they leave?
Stress and workload are the top reasons teachers find another profession, according to the research.
Talk to teachers and they will acknowledge they were as anxious as their students to have the school year end. Even those who will renew their contracts were ready for the break, some of them literally counting the days. They need to be free from that stress and the ever-shifting workload that public education presents these days.
The job has become more than they bargained for and a lot of them are leaving for other careers.
Ginny Blankenship, a legislative analyst, told lawmakers at a joint meeting of the education committees that the constantly changing mandates and lack of autonomy in their classrooms crushes teachers' motivation.
"It's not that they don't want to work hard," she said. "Most choose to go above and beyond because they love their students."
They don't love the required paperwork, what they consider to be unnecessary meetings and other demands on their time. Nor do they love the stress that piles up on them as they face ever-changing rules and testing requirements.
If they can find a less-stressful job that suits them, some will simply opt out of teaching.
Researchers surveyed teachers and principals in a random sample of schools in 2015, collecting their perceptions of teacher recruitment, retention and working conditions.
Teachers and principals alike cited the difficulty in offering competitive salaries as the top barrier to both teacher recruitment and retention.
Consider the difference. In Rogers, a huge district in Benton County, the average teacher salary is more than $59,700 while the average in tiny Hughes in St. Francis County is $35,000. Those districts represent the extremes but the median salary among all districts in Arkansas was just more than $43,000.
So there is competition among districts as well as competition for the skills of teachers outside the profession.
The second most-cited issue in teacher recruitment was the scarcity of appropriately licensed teachers. Teachers who leave for bigger districts ranked second on the list of issues affecting teacher retention.
Another part of the study notes that location of an individual school or district factors into the problems, too.
That factor is most significant in rural areas, which have higher levels of poverty, limited opportunities for young teachers in the community and fewer jobs for spouses, the report said.
All of the findings in the research should help the Legislature and state education officials to address teacher turnover.
Programs are already in place to give financial incentives to teachers who will work in a high-priority district, such as those in high-poverty areas.
There are also programs to attract students to teaching, particularly in areas such as science, technology, engineering and math as well as other specialties. Other programs help students to get their teaching certificates or financial assistance.
And, of course, there are efforts under way to cut down on paperwork and other burdens that teachers cite as reasons for leaving the profession.
All of that has to help, but the state must clearly do more to encourage students to enter the field and to keep them on the job.
Meanwhile, school is out and teachers have the summer to recharge for the next school year.
Commentary on 06/01/2016