Child care needs among the top reasons North Carolina teachers resign

A handful of women gathered inside of Jessica McCrory’s living room in Winston-Salem one afternoon in April.

She was hosting a meetup for the advocacy group MomsRising, where members organize around issues impacting women, mothers and families. A couple of the women brought their babies, which made sense, seeing as the topic of discussion for this gathering was the state’s shortage of child care. 

One by one the moms went around the room sharing their own experiences of having children, struggling to find care, and for some, leaving their jobs. McCrory started them off.  

“So I was a public school teacher. I taught Spanish at Reynolds High School, and I loved it," she said. "And when we found out that we were pregnant with our first child, I was nervous, you know.”

She said she decided to take a year off to sort out child care, and then go back. She looked for day cares, half-day options, and potentially hiring a nanny, or asking family members to fill in the gaps. But she says the only solution that made sense was for her to stay home. 

What she thought would be one year away from school, turned into 12. 

“I have not been back in public education, even though I really love it and feel like that is my calling," McCrory said. "And I, especially as, you know during COVID, the teacher turnover has been so great, and I can't help but wonder how many quality educators have left teaching because the salary is not enough to cover the cost of childcare, even for one child? Even if you can afford it, the spaces are not there.”

North Carolina, and Forsyth County specifically, are considered child care deserts. The average monthly cost for a day care program is about $800 per child, but even parents who can pay for that struggle to find slots. And the issue stands to worsen. 

Federal emergency child care stabilization funds ran out in June. The North Carolina legislature allocated roughly $68 million to providers to compensate, somewhat, for the loss. But experts say without further investment, more and more of these centers will close. 

That impacts employees in all sectors. But with a teacher shortage happening simultaneously, some believe the two issues may be linked. 

Kathryn Packett is one of them. She used to teach in Lexington City Schools, and most recently, Winston-Salem/Forsyth County. 

“I loved it. I thought that I had a lot of purpose being there," Packett said. "And I really felt like it was a way that I could make sure that every child could have a quality education.”

She had her daughter in 2021. That was before North Carolina teachers were given paid parental leave — a change in state law that only came in 2023. Before that legislation passed, educators had to apply their personal time off or take unpaid leave to have a child. 

Packett had saved up personal and sick days for seven years in order to take paid time off to have her baby. And while she’d originally planned to return to school afterward, that’s not what happened. 

“There were a lot of small pieces that I had to think about that I don't think are obvious to people who are not in the teaching world," Packett said. 

One of those pieces is the hours teachers work. They have what are called contract hours, which is the time that they’re paid for. For Packett, that was between 7:50 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. But she says she was usually at her school much later than that.

“You know if it's 4, 4:15, 4:45, 5 p.m. and we're still waiting on the buses, we the teachers stay with the children," she said. 

She doesn’t get paid overtime for that — or for the meetings, lesson planning, and extracurriculars that take place after school. Packett says if she’s working past her contracted hours without pay, but still paying for child care, she’s losing money. She also cited the lack of breaks for teachers during the school day, and the amount of energy it takes to work with 25 kids at a time. 

Between the cost and availability of child care, her salary as a teacher, and the working conditions, Packett made the choice not to return to her school. But it wasn’t easy. 

“I don't know anybody who just like went into teaching, willy-nilly. I do think that there's a very, like, deep intrinsic motivation," Packett said. "So I think that, you know, every teacher who decides not to come back, it's a very heart-wrenching decision to make.”

According to North Carolina’s State of the Teaching Profession Report, child care needs was one of the top reasons teachers left their jobs last year, right behind making a career change and retiring with full benefits. 

The state lost 709 teachers in the 22-23 school year because they had family responsibilities. Over the past five years, that reason has accounted for nearly 3,000 public school teachers leaving their jobs. 

Kelsey Williams, who taught at Brunson Elementary School in Winston-Salem, is one of them. She says access to affordable, quality child care, maybe even through her employer, could have prevented that. 

“As teachers, and moms, our most precious things are our children," Williams said. "And so if you make us and our families feel valued and important, the retention is going to be there.”

And it’s not just teachers leaving their jobs. A report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce published this year found that child care issues result in an estimated loss of more than $5.5 billion annually for North Carolina’s economy. 

The research also found that because of these challenges, a quarter of surveyed households in the state experienced changes to their employment situation— with another 15% of working parents planning to leave their jobs within the next year. 

But leaving isn’t a choice everyone has the option of making. That was the case for Brooke Stone, a teacher at West Forsyth High School. She had her daughter almost a year ago.  

"It's hard because child care is more than half my paycheck right now. But my husband's company does not have health insurance for the whole family, so we need health insurance for me and for her," Stone said. "And he also doesn't make a lot of money either. So the remainder of my paycheck we still need.” 

Stone says she was lucky to find a day care spot. But the challenges that come with teaching and being a new mom have caused her to change how she works. 

For example, she still breastfeeds so she has to find time to pump at work, in her classroom. That means she doesn’t offer lunchtime meetings for students anymore. And if they want to talk to her before or after school, she’s decided she’ll only offer 20 minutes on either end. 

“Because it really kind of solidified for me like my job is my job. And being a mom is my life," Stone said. "I leave here on time, go home with my baby, and she gets my full attention.”

But everything doesn’t always go to plan. Stone recalls a time the school went on lockdown, which changed the schedule for the whole day.  

“So I didn't get to pump when I was supposed to. My classes got thrown off for the next couple of days. So all the time I would normally have to get work done just kind of evaporated," Stone said. "Which puts me three days behind in grading, which then puts me three nights up late, because if anything goes awry, everything else changes.”

And the same goes for arranging child care.

“If one piece of this very carefully constructed puzzle is removed, everything crumbles," she said. "And that's really hard.”

In North Carolina, about 80% of teachers are women. But the landscape of child care options in the state doesn’t make it easy for mothers to stay in those jobs. And for the ones that do, the conditions and demands of being a teacher make it difficult to do their other job— being a mom. 

“It’s a weird, tough place to be. Because that's not what I want to do," Stone said. "I want to be able to be a mom and be a teacher, but people want you to have to be 100% on either end. And that's not an option.”

Stone is making it work for now, but if she decides to have more children, she says she’ll probably have to quit. The cost of child care for two kids would make working relatively pointless for her. If she had a third, it would be out of the question. 

Stone, like thousands of other teachers in the state, would be forced to choose between caring for the children in her classroom, or her own.

Amy Diaz covers education for WFDD in partnership with Report For America. You can follow her on Twitter at @amydiaze.