Investing in Educators: The Key to Rebuilding After the Pandemic
June 18, 2025
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This is the seventh part of a twenty-one blog series, 5 Years Later: Lessons, Innovation, and the Future of Public Education, exploring how PreK-12 education has evolved and what lessons we carry forward. This series will highlight the resilience, creativity, and strategic adaptations that have redefined public education since the pandemic. View the full schedule and roster of contributors
July 1, 2020, was a difficult day for me to begin my career as a superintendent, no doubt. But it was around 2022 that things really got complicated. Educators pulled through the beginning stages of the pandemic like champs. We stepped up our game and made amazing things happen against ridiculous odds.
The Tough Times Set In
Coming out of the pandemic was when the toughest challenges emerged. Workdays extended well beyond normal hours, taking an incredible toll on everyone鈥檚 mental health. The 鈥渟elf-care鈥� movement went from being appreciated and embraced to being labeled 鈥渢oxic positivity.鈥� What once were warm and fuzzy buzzwords鈥斺�渂ubble baths and wine鈥濃�攂ecame seen as cheap band-aids for deep wounds.
The entire education industry took hits that will be difficult to recover from: huge deficits in student growth, big gaps in student readiness, and increased anxiety for both students and adults.
Rethinking How We Invest Time and Resources
Faced with these challenges, we had to think differently about how we spent our money and time. Our choice was to invest in our teachers. Focusing on our foundational educators (K-5), we set out to reduce their workload and reprioritize their time.
We hired an entirely new team of teachers to teach science and social studies to all K-5 students for 60-90 minutes per week. While the team teaches entire grade levels simultaneously, the classroom teachers from that grade level meet together or with our curriculum director to rebuild our Guaranteed Viable and Transparent Curriculum in ELA, Math, and SEL.
This new structure has eliminated early release days, which were a burden to working parents, and created scheduled collaboration, planning, and professional development time for our staff. As a result, all children also access project-based learning and 鈥渆nrichment鈥� style teaching through the specialized science and social studies instruction offered by the new team.
Teachers, not programs or one-off workshops, are the key to improving student outcomes.
Supporting Educators as Professionals
Transparency was especially important as our community鈥檚 oversight increased during the post-COVID era. On top of that, we found ourselves at the start of a revolution in elementary literacy instruction and technology integration鈥攕pecifically, a move toward "de-integration" as we began to see the effects of ubiquitous technology usage on student engagement and mental health.
This dedicated time for our elementary teams has been revitalizing. It respects their need for boundaries on their time and investments in their knowledge base.
I cannot underestimate the impact of giving adults time (without having to plan for a substitute) to come together weekly to 鈥渞umble鈥� about teaching and learning (yes, we love here, too). They examine data, craft lessons and assessments, and nurture their desire for adult relationships and collegial support
Positive Feedback and Early Indicators of Success
Though we have just begun this work and cannot yet attribute any achievement data to this shift, we have strong leading indicators that we are on the right track.At our elementary school, staff reporting high levels of satisfaction and engagement improved from 79% last spring to 93% after just two months of this meeting time. Additionally, all six indicators of culture and climate in the training and development
domain of our survey improved.
The Importance of Valuing Teachers
In our quest to 鈥渆nsure fidelity鈥� to research-based practices and programs, we have lost focus on fidelity to student outcomes. We have failed to recognize that teachers, not programs or one-off workshops, are the key to improving those outcomes.
Our teachers need time to understand their standards, explore the research around what works best for students, and the resources to implement those strategies. They also need ongoing support as they apply this knowledge in the classroom.
A Collaborative Vision for the Future
