Loribeth Chenault scrolls through her Facebook friends list. And it reads like a Who’s Who of former Milwaukee Public Schools teachers.

This one left to teach in Oak Creek, she says, and this one in the Twin Cities.

One now works in the nonprofit sector. A few have moved into administrative posts. And two others — one a former teacher, the other a school counselor — are selling real estate.

All of them, she says, are earning more than they did working in Wisconsin’s largest school district serving some of the state's most vulnerable children.

“I can name at least 40 people who’ve left since I joined the district since I got here in 2008,” said Chenault, an English teacher at Hamilton High School on Milwaukee’s south side.

Those 40 — 42 to be exact — are part of a mass exodus of teachers out of classrooms in southeastern Wisconsin in the years following Act 10, the 2011 state law that eliminated most collective bargaining for teachers and most other public employees.

MPS has been particularly hard hit. It saw a net loss of 730 teachers between 2010 and 2014, according to a 2015 report by the Public Policy Forum. In addition, more than 1,600 resigned, retired or were dismissed in the last four years alone, the district said. The district has 330 vacant positions, 268 of them for teachers.

SPECIAL REPORT:Act 10 at Five

The net effect, teachers say, is a hodgepodge system in which students are taught by fledgling teachers on emergency licenses, or teachers aides and subs — if schools can get them. And when they can’t, full-time teachers take turns filling in during their prep periods, or they bring those students into their own classrooms.

“That’s not learning,” said Jesse Bolling, a special education teacher at Rufus King High School, one of Milwaukee’s highest-performing schools, which he said lost about eight teachers this year.

“The constant turnover is creating a system that is collapsing in on itself,” said Bolling, who earns about $48,000 after seven years. “If that’s what’s happening at Rufus King, I can’t imagine what it’s like everywhere else.”

The MPS school board agreed last month to reinstate a more generous “steps and lanes” salary schedule that will provide incremental raises for teachers and other employees based on years of experience and educational levels.

It was a major victory for the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association, which had argued it was needed to stabilize the workforce.

MTEA President Amy Mizialko said teachers will be more likely to stay if they can see their salaries will grow over time, and that that stability is "fundamental" for improving outcomes for children in Milwaukee.

"We can't do right by students with a vacancy rate like that. ... It negatively impacts learning, and it negatively impacts relationship-building," she said. "And relationship-building (with students) is key to everything in terms of academic learning, but also their social-emotional development."

MPS officials said freezing wages in the wake of Act 10 and opening an early retirement window have exacerbated the exodus. Lonnie Anderson, interim director of talent management, said he believes the salary schedule is one way to help stem that tide, and that there's a consensus among board members, administrators and the teachers union that it's the right thing to do.

"We all understand that the budget is a moral document ... a values document," said Anderson. "From what I see ... there's a lot of passion around doing what's right both for the adults and the kids."

Milwaukee Public Schools teachers earned on average about $60,000 a year in 2018, according to the latest data available from the state Department of Public Instruction. That's on par with traditional public school teachers in southeastern Wisconsin and the state's median household income. But many are newer teachers at the lower end of the pay scale, which starts at about $42,500.

And many teachers argue they can do better, in both salary and working conditions, in some surrounding suburbs — some of which have traditional salary schedules that will elevate their pay faster.

For example, full-time teachers with 10 to 19 years' experience and a master’s degree at MPS — the most common experience and education combination in southeastern Wisconsin — were paid an average of $67,100 in 2017-'18. That’s just above the average of $65,875 across all districts in Kenosha, Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Racine, Washington and Waukesha counties.

But teachers with those qualifications were paid more at 21 districts in southeastern Wisconsin. Average salaries for that experience and education group were around $79,000 at Arrowhead High School’s standalone district, $77,000 at Nicolet High School and $74,000 in the Wheatland J1 School District.

A similar story played out across all experience and education groups.

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When comparing each grouping of teachers to those with similar experience and education, MPS teachers were about $2,000 above the regional average, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis. Nicolet topped that list at $11,000 above the regional average. Arrowhead, Oak Creek-Franklin and Muskego-Norway districts were all at least $5,000 above the average.

Among the 10 largest districts in the six-county area, Milwaukee’s salaries overall in this analysis were third-highest, behind Oak Creek-Franklin, Elmbrook and Waukesha. But some districts have formal salary schedules that push wages higher over time.

In that landscape, it's not unusual for talented teachers to be recruited or look for better opportunities elsewhere.

In the last two years, according to Bolling, Rufus King lost two special education teachers, one to Shorewood and the other to Whitefish Bay. And this year, a chemistry teacher left mid-year for private industry.

"I've turned down positions twice in the suburbs, once in the arts community, because I love ... serving students who might not normally have access to music instruction," said Erica Breitbarth, a Grammy Award-nominated educator who earns about $56,000 as the music director for Reagan High School on the south side.

"But if I had a family, there'd be no way that would be possible."

The temptation is particularly acute for younger workers, many of whom are carrying soul-crushing debt and say they've never had a raise other than cost-of-living bumps that haven't always kept pace with inflation.

"A lot of first-year teachers I started with aren't in the district anymore," said Elizabeth Kosmach, a six-year special education teacher at Wedgewood Park Middle School who earns about $46,000.

"I know if I went to a suburban district I could be making five to ten thousand more," said Kosmach. "What's keeping me here is I love my job."

That's a common refrain for many MPS teachers who see their work, in a district that primarily serves low-income students of color, as a mission in the service of a greater good. But that devotion comes at a price.

Many work more than one job to cover their bills, pay down their debt or provide a middle-class standard of living for their families. Chenault, for example, drives Lyft and works as an online tutor. Vincent High School teacher Monica Gahan said in a letter read at the school board meeting last month that she sells her plasma.

Kosmach works at the Jewish Community Center in Whitefish Bay, every day after school and then 10 hours every other weekend.

"I wake up at 5:45 and some days I'm not home until 7 p.m.," said Kosmach, who pays more than $1,000 a month on her student loans and hundreds in out-of-pocket expenses for a chronic health condition.

"My parents are both teachers. They taught in Illinois. My mom sends me applications all the time."

Bigger, broader issues

The discontent among teachers is not just about wages. Their colleagues have left for myriad reasons: They cite lack of respect and support from principals and administrators, and bad behaviors, even violence, in their schools. Many retired out of fear they'd lose benefits in the years after Act 10.

But wages are a big part of it, they say, in part because Act 10 also cut into their take-home pay by requiring workers to pick up a portion of their health care and retirement costs.

The turnover and concerns about salaries go beyond teachers. Layli McLaughlin, a college-educated American Sign Language interpreter, wept at a school board meeting in May talking about her work with some of the district's most vulnerable students for which she earns about $30,000 a year.

Speech pathologists flee for better-paying jobs in health care or suburban schools, 26-year veteran Linda Porosky told board members.

And many mostly part-time lower-wage workers who keep a school humming — teachers aides, janitors, food service workers and the like — also have left as the tight labor market pushed wages and hours up elsewhere. Mizialko put the turnover rate of teachers aides, or "paras," at about 50%. But Anderson said many of those have moved into the pipeline to become teachers.

The new salary schedule will include all those workers. And it will move up the lowest-wage workers, those earning less than $15 an hour, first.

That was important to many teachers, including Angela Harris, a former education assistant who teaches kindergarten at Martin Luther King Junior School on an emergency license while she works toward her state certification.

At about $43,000 a year, including her summer-school load, Harris said, she's "surviving paycheck to paycheck."

But, she said, it's much harder for teachers aides and other lower-wage staff who generally don't work full-time and have to cobble together multiple jobs to pay their bills.

"I've walked in their shoes. I've lived that life. .... I've had to endure having my electricity cut off because I couldn't afford it," she said.

"When you look at the demographics of (those workers), the majority of them are people of color. When we talk about equity in our district, the most equitable thing we can do is to bring those people up so they can support themselves and not work two and three jobs to survive," she said.

"For me, it's more important that they are compensated, even before me as a teacher."

How we did it

The Journal Sentinel analysis compared teacher pay between districts by focusing on differences between similarly situated teachers in southeastern Wisconsin.

We grouped teachers by experience (0-4 years, 5-9, 10-19, 20-29 ,30+) and education level, where we limited the analysis to those with a bachelor’s or master’s degree. We then compared teachers in each of those 10 groups to the regional average. For example, salaries for Milwaukee Public Schools teachers with 10-19 years experience and a master’s degree were compared with the average for teachers with that experience and education across Kenosha, Milwaukee, Oshkosh, Racine, Washington and Waukesha counties.

We then combined those differences into a single number per district by weighting each group based on how many teachers the district had in that group.

Contact Annysa Johnson at anjohnson@jrn.com or 414-224-2061. Follow her on Twitter at @JSEdbeat. And join the Journal Sentinel conversation about education issues at www.facebook.com/groups/WisconsinEducation.