Educators in Door County are seeing their pay stagnate more than other industries and that could be causing a teacher shortage. As the job market gets better in Wisconsin and all over the country, the teaching industry is taking a hit. Teachers are quitting in record high numbers according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. Joyce Turba is a representative of Southern Door United Educators, the teachers’ union at Southern Door School District. Turba says there was a higher than normal turnover rate among teachers from last school year to this. She didn’t want to attribute that to the job market since there were some teachers who were retiring anyway. Turba says there is a shortage of teachers at Southern Door and it may be because people with college degrees can make more elsewhere in the job market.
So while teaching was considered a safe place to work with high unemployment rates, the pay may not be good enough to keep many college-educated people in the teaching world. Turba has been teaching at Southern Door for 32 years as a special education instructor.