TULSA, Okla. — Brogan Spears and her husband, both public school teachers here in Tulsa, don’t expect to start a family in the next decade — but it’s not because they don’t want children. They just can’t afford it.

Spears, 25, said she loves teaching, despite the poor pay that leaves her eating crackers for lunch or taking money out of her savings to buy groceries. But the small number in their bank account is making Spears and her husband ask a difficult question considered by many teachers around the country: Can they afford to work in education?

Today Spears brings home slightly more than $2,100 a month from teaching in Oklahoma and, like many teachers, she has taken on additional jobs to make up the income gap. But she worries that it affects her ability as an educator.

“That’s not fair to the students to have a teacher who desperately wants to be there but that is so distracted by so many other factors that she can’t do her best job,” Spears said. “This year [it] has become very evident that I don’t get to do my best job because I’m working at my other jobs late or I didn’t get to grade their papers because I was working somewhere else or because I came home and I was just exhausted.”

These are just a few of the reasons she and many other Oklahoma public school educators have felt compelled to abandon their classes and march on the statehouse in recent days.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said at her home in Tulsa. “I love teaching and I love the kids, but I don’t know that I can continue to do it.”

Brogan Spears NBC News

“We have to fight,” she added quickly. “I won’t go out without a fight.”

These long-term struggles have made the profession difficult for current teachers and unattractive to those who might choose it as a career. And many across the country have taken up the mantle to push the conversation forward in state legislatures.

Teachers in Kentucky, Arizona, West Virginia and Oklahoma have already taken to the streets, and educators in other states are beginning to pursue similar organizing tactics — all because trying to make a living in their chosen profession has become a near-impossible challenge.

“We’re at the nadir for the teaching profession,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, the president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute and professor emeritus at Stanford University.

Darling-Hammond said that prospects for the profession haven’t been this low since the 1980s, and she explained that much of the work to rebuild it has been steadily dismantled by state governments, led by both Republicans and Democrats, since the late 1990s. GOP administrations have been quicker to cut and slower to reintroduce funding, she added.

Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings. This site is protected by recaptcha

As a result, teachers earn about 30 percent less than other educated workers, and the attrition rate for the profession in the United States is twice that of most Western countries, according to an August 2017 study by the Learning Policy Institute.