On Tuesday morning, Orange County classrooms will fill up again.
THE SERAAJ FILES, by Kevin Seraaj, J.D., M.Div.
Parents fighting traffic on their ways to their children’s schools. School buses running through the neighborhoods making frequent stops to pick up kids. Children will get to see their favorite teachers again, proudly showing off the new clothing, shoes and bookbags thoughtfully purchased during back-to-school sales.
But then the annual back-to-school celebration will end. Reality will seep back into the relationship teachers have with the people who employ them. And Orange County will once again face the unrelenting question that should concern every parent and taxpayer:
Can we afford to keep good teachers in our classrooms?
Teacher compensation and health-insurance costs remain subjects of contract negotiations as the 2026–27 school year begins. To many people this issue is just another internal labor dispute between a union and a school district.
But it’s much more than that. It is a community issue. Teachers are complaining that they cannot afford to live in the neighborhoods that surround the schools where they work. Sooner or later, that reality will dictate a choice between moving farther away, taking a second job, transferring to another school district, or packing up and leaving education for goood.
Each choice eventually reaches the classroom.
We’ve been talking about this issue for a very long time. Teacher turnover disrupts schools (and sometimes schools, or students, disrupt teachers– but that’s an entirely different conversation.) Vacancies burden remaining teachers. Experienced educators become harder to replace. We all know the drill.
Orange County cannot claim to value education while treating the people delivering that education as an annual budget problem.
Don’t get me wrong. There are legitimate limits on public spending. Taxpayers deserve responsible management, and compensation negotiations must account for what the district can sustainably afford. But who among us has not heard the embarrassing stories of teachers spending their own hard-earned money buying supplies for their classrooms?
There is no single national statistic that directly counts “how many teachers leave education because of pay.” But the best available national data shows pay is one of the major drivers. Using turnover rates and pay‑related findings from RAND, NCES, EPI, and Learning Policy Institute, it’s clear that teachers as a group are underpaid. They earn 73 cents on the dollar compared to similarly educated professionals. We entrust the educational development of our precious children to people we do not reward for helping them.
Teachers experienced a 9% real wage decline from 2010–2021. Researchers can only infer from the surveys and the teacher job numbers what that means about teacher departure, but they estimate that nationally 20–30% or 114,000–171,000 teachers leave teaching every year due to pay.
So, any calculations brought to the negotiating table has to include the cost of not retaining existing teachers. Recruiting replacement teachers costs money. Turnover costs the school district years of experience and institutional knowledge. And ultimately our children are the ones who pay a price that doesn’t show up neatly in a budget spreadsheet.
As Orange County students return to school on Tuesday, school leaders, elected officials and the public should make teacher retention part of the year’s education agenda—not something that gets discussed only when contract negotiations become contentious.
We tell teachers they are essential.
Our policies should demonstrate that we mean it.
- Kevin Seraaj
- Kevin Seraaj
- Kevin Seraaj
- Kevin Seraaj
