Credit: Andra Cernavskis/The Hechinger Study

Maria Lemus, far left, paints the alphabet with siblings Adrian and Kimberly Lorencillo and their grandmother before most of the other students arrive.

Credit: Andra Cernavskis/The Hechinger Report

Maria Lemus, far left, paints the alphabet with siblings Adrian and Kimberly Lorencillo and their grandmother before nearly of the other students arrive.

Andra Cernavskis/The Hechinger Report
September 21, 2015

Maria Alicia Lemus, a lead instructor in a Head Start classroom in San Francisco'due south Bayview neighborhood, loves her job. She'due south but not certain how long she'll be able to afford it.

Lemus said she makes $31,000 a year, after paying taxes, for her work at Caput Start, the federally funded programme for vulnerable children – a salary that's not much more than than what the families who qualify for the program earn.

"People don't see the value in early education," said Lemus, 24, of the wages she earns. "The hard work nosotros do every day."

Lemus, who is single, does not come across the federal authorities's poverty guidelines of $11,770 for a one-person household, but similar many early childhood teachers, she feels she is only a broken-down car or steep medical bill away from being in the same boat equally the families of the children she teaches.

And that's despite working another task.

Lemus is dedicated to pursuing early education work for her whole career, merely losing aggressive teachers like her to higher paying K-12 jobs is a real risk. For those who do stay, making ends encounter is a abiding challenge, specially in high-cost-of-living states, like California, and expensive cities, similar San Francisco.

"The programs serving the almost vulnerable children are the programs that you lot need the most stable and caring staffing," said Gretchen Ames, who teaches a grade on public policies relating to children at San Francisco State University. But she says that staff in these programs "are the near probable to have unstable lives" because of the economic hardships they face.

Ames, who is at present pursuing a doctorate in educational leadership at Mills Higher in Oakland, California, worked in a center like Lemus' last year. Every instructor in her classroom had at least ane, if not multiple, other jobs. Ames believes the teachers' stress exacerbated the stress in the lives of their students. One woman worked a nighttime shift every bit a nurse'south assistant in addition to her work as a teacher. Ames said there were days when the woman would come to work after not having slept for 24 hours.

"She would come up to piece of work so tired and she would attempt to read a book to a child and but fall asleep," Ames said. "Her center is in the right place, but she couldn't stay awake."

Related: Silicon Valley's skyrocketing housing costs close out teachers

Lemus works long hours too. She starts her day at 7:xx a.m. to fix for the 8 a.m. inflow of students. From and so on, she'southward in constant motion. Ane minute she's navigating outside play time, the adjacent she's leading students dorsum into the classroom, where she reviews the days of the week with the class and showed them simple add-on problems.

Her classroom is bilingual and Lemus switched easily between English and Castilian throughout the day. Although she was born in Los Angeles, Lemus spent most of her childhood in El Salvador and didn't return to the U.Southward. until she was 12-years-old.

Related: In Central California, Head Start finds new ways to attain children of migrant workers

Similar her, all but ane of the four teachers in Lemus' classroom immigrated to the U.S. from Latin America. And every one of them is struggling to pay bills. One woman lives with her girl in order to afford San Francisco's high rent; another is in low-income housing. A third teacher was merely evicted from her habitation in San Mateo, 30 minutes to the south of the city, and is now living with her daughter in San Francisco's more often than not low-income Bayview neighborhood while she tries to find new housing.

"Sometimes I don't know how I practise it every day," said Maria Alicia Lemus, a pb instructor in a Head Get-go classroom in San Francisco.

While early educators living in less costly cities and rural areas of the state accept it a bit easier, these San Francisco teachers are inappreciably solitary in struggling to live comfortably on their salaries. Co-ordinate to the University of California, Berkeley report, almost half of the families of child care workers need financial assist from government assistance programs.

Only it hasn't ever been that way. Marcy Whitebook, director of the Center for the Written report of Child Intendance Employment at UC Berkeley, said that when she began working in the field over 30 years ago, California paid early educators well.

Subsequently World War II, California was the only state to maintain the child intendance centers it had opened during the state of war to accommodate the young mothers who replaced men in the workforce. Co-ordinate to Whitebook, who has written almost the history of early childhood educational activity, these centers were of high quality and developmentally advisable for the children they served.

But, over the years, quality standards and funding eroded, Whitebook said. This trend continued in the early 1970s when Whitebook entered the early childhood didactics field.

"[Child] intendance was never defined as a necessary service," she said.

And that, she explained, is i of the reasons why things have not improved much for the nearly 56,000 preschool teachers in the country.

Maria Lemus files paperwork while students nap.

Credit: Andra Cernavskis/The Hechinger Report

Maria Lemus files paperwork while students nap.

Over the years, at that place have been a few efforts to help early childhood teachers, including those who piece of work for Caput Start, according to Elise Crane, a senior policy analyst in San Francisco's Office of Early Care and Instruction. In 2000, San Francisco Canton responded to an exodus of teachers being lured away from the profession by the dot-com boom by establishing a plan to supplement their wages, Crane said. Newly named C-WAGES in 2012, the program helps public centers pay their staff based on the workers' job championship and educational activity level and then that earnings outset to move closer to a living wage.

The city's nearly $13.5 million initiative, only $500,000 of which comes from the land, provides a salary increase to early education workers like Lemus who work in centers in which at least 25 per centum of the students come from low-income families equally defined by the local child care planning council in San Francisco (a family of four making less than $46,896 a yr is considered low-income), Crane said. These extra wages are provided to workers at 80 centers in the city, including all Caput Offset programs, as well some staff at family child care facilities.

Sara Hicks-Kilday, president of the San Francisco Kid Intendance Providers' Association, concedes that this makes the wage situation better in San Francisco than other cities in the state, even neighboring Oakland. But it's not nearly enough for young workers, like Lemus, who want to live in the city, she said.

Related: New bill would significantly expand state preschool in California

Fifty-fifty with initiatives like C-WAGES, information technology's becoming more than and more hard to notice qualified teachers to work in Head Kickoff classrooms with the kinds of wages beingness offered, according to Rick Mockler, the executive managing director of the California Head Commencement Association.

"Hiring has gotten tougher across the board partly considering the market for teachers is changing," Mockler said. "We've helped a lot of our teachers get B.A.'s, and so a lot of them are getting hired by schoolhouse districts if they have a credential. With transitional kindergarten, school districts have more money to rent more teachers."

While some argue that parents with means should pay more tuition in sure schools, Crane said heart leaders tin only enquire so much of even moderate-income families, who are themselves struggling with San Francisco's rising cost of living.

"You tin can't ask these low-income parents to share the costs, and the state isn't willing to pay more to serve these students," Crane said. "Information technology comes down to a values thing."

At 4 p.thou., Lemus leaves the center for her second job. The children'south parents don't usually pick them upwardly before v p.one thousand., only the schoolhouse understands that Lemus needs to work 2 jobs. The three other teachers remain in the classroom until all the children have been sent dwelling house. By six p.thou., Lemus is back at work, delivering meals ordered through an app called Sprig to people's doors in neighborhoods where homes got for millions of dollars.

"Sometimes I don't know how I do it every day," Lemus said as she drove through the San Francisco streets. "I call back I do it because I care. I know I'm making an impact. A small one, simply it'south something."

This story was written byThe Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organisation focused on inequality and innovation in instruction. Read more about California schools.

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