Elementary school teacher Sariah McCall was in her classroom every morning at 6:45 a.m., taught bell-to-bell classes, attended meetings du...
Elementary school teacher Sariah McCall was in her classroom every morning at 6:45 a.m., taught bell-to-bell classes, attended meetings during her planning period and worked assigned lunch and recess duties with little time to eat or go to the restroom. When the bell rang for the 2:15 p.m. student dismissal, she worked an assigned bus or hall duty, followed by lesson and classroom prep. Sometimes, she left school by 5 p.m. At home, McCall would work on more grading and paper work until 11 p.m. or midnight, then finally sleep — and repeat.
But the workload was not sustainable for McCall. Now, she’s sharing the powerful resignation letter she wrote explaining why she left teaching for good.
“The only things keeping me from resigning until now were the love I have for my students, the love I have for the act of teaching, and the heavy guilt I feel for my children being negatively impacted by this in any way: emotionally or academically,” McCall wrote to the Charleston County School District in November.
“However, I cannot set myself on fire to keep someone else warm,” McCall wrote as a slight to an “inspirational” teacher quote that likens teachers to candles that must “consume itself to light the way for others.”
“I felt like I was running on a hamster while going nowhere. I was just working all the time and there was still more to do. The to-do-list was never-ending,” McCall tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “I just couldn't do it anymore.”
And McCall isn’t the only one — South Carolina has been dealing with a mass exodus of public teachers leaving their positions. According to the South Carolina Annual Educator Supply & Demand Report, over 7,300 public school teachers left their positions left during or at the end of the 2017 to 2018 school year. Nearly 73 percent of those educators are no longer teaching in any South Carolina public school.
“There’s mass teacher burnout in this state. We’re so overworked,” says 8th-grade math teacher Sanni Perry, a board member for an education advocacy group called SC for Education that McCall was also involved with. “We don’t have break to go to the bathroom or eat lunch. When you combine all that together on top of the financial stress, you can only give so much of yourself. I’m putting out all these fires but there’s nothing left for me to give. I cannot maintain a healthy lifestyle and keep my sanity with everything that I’m having to do.”
McCall says she never saw herself leaving teaching until it was happening. However, when she found that her job became “less about teaching the kids and making sure that mandates were fulfilled,” McCall made the decision that her own well-being needed to take precedence. “You can't keep killing yourself over it because it's not helping anybody. I had to prioritize that I had to be more important than my career. And it still sounds really selfish and I still feel guilty about it,” McCall explains.