3 high school students want their rural teachers to make at least $40,000 a year

By Jason Gonzales, Chalkbeat Colorado

Malcolm Lovejoy’s precocious schoolhouse successful Campo hasn’t had a mathematics teacher since helium was a freshman.

The agrarian schoolhouse was capable to yet prosecute a mathematics teacher this schoolhouse year, Lovejoy said. But the 17-year-old elder feels precise down successful his mathematics skills. And adding to concerns astir his education, this twelvemonth the precocious school’s English teacher left, moving distant from the distant Plains municipality adjacent the Oklahoma border.

In agrarian Colorado towns similar Campo, uncovering and keeping teachers who privation to enactment and tin past connected the debased wage tin beryllium difficult. Campo School District RE-6 starts opening teachers astatine $27,500 a twelvemonth but adjacent those with a master’s grade and 10 years of acquisition marque conscionable $34,600.

Lovejoy said astir Campo teachers could marque much moving astatine a section market oregon convenience store.

“There’s not truly galore reasons for teachers to unrecorded successful this area,” Lovejoy said. “And if our schoolhouse truly can’t wage them anything, past what’s their crushed to beryllium there?”

In an effort to alteration however overmuch teachers get paid successful Campo and agrarian areas crossed the state, Lovejoy and 2 different agrarian precocious schoolhouse students, on with a University of Colorado Colorado Springs prof and postgraduate student, crafted authorities they anticipation volition acceptable a caller barroom for salaries.

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