***Let me be very clear: I love my job. I love my co-workers. I’m not asking for a pay raise. My district is fantastic and I am very supported. This is merely for a shift in perspective 🙂 ***

We all know that teachers only work 9 months a year, so why are we getting paid like we work our tails off all year round? Summers, weekends, and holidays off… even snow days!!! But, all we do is babysit… so maybe it’s time we get paid like it!

You can hire babysitters for much below minimum wage these days. Let’s just do that. Let’s just ask for $3 an hour only for 6 hours a day and not a minute more (this excludes lunch and “prep”). That’s $18 per day! If parents paid for school, this would be just $18 dollars a day per kid! That’s cheap babysitting!

Multiply that $18 by, let’s just say, 25 students. (Disregard the Specialist Teachers who teach 10x that many per day, or the Special Educators, or those with Master Degrees, years of experience, etc. – Equal playing field – that’s what’s fair!)
That’s $450 per day!!!
Woah, that’s way too much to pay a teacher!
But remember, we only work 180 days a year!
$450 X 180 = $81,000 per year! For only SIX hours a day and only NINE months!!!
This is insane and beyond realistic.

But wait… we should be paid minimum wage ($7.25/hour) since we are humans after all. Just for kicks and giggles – $7.25 X 6 hours X 25 students X 180 days = $195,750 per year!

I’m so confused, I thought you wanted to pay us for what we do… babysit!
We teach your/our children, keep them safe, love them, and work well over 6 hours a day for maybe $50,000 a year. (if we are lucky enough some day!)

Let’s break this down – $50,000 per year/180 days = $277.77 per day/25 students = $11.11/6 hours per day = $1.85!!!

$1.85 per child, per hour, per day.
That is the cheapest babysitting I have ever heard of!!

The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.
– President Franklin D. Roosevelt

Cheers 🙂