Clifton Hills Elementary School fourth-grade teacher Donna Perkins organizes her classroom. Perkins is a first-year teacher at the school, which has the highest concentration of teachers fresh out of college.Donna Perkins’ classroom is stocked with whiteboards, desks and computers, but little else.
It will take a massive amount of work to make her room as bright and welcoming as those of other teachers at Clifton Hills Elementary School, but the first-year fourth-grade teacher finds one consolation in the task ahead.
“The positive thing about having nothing is I can make it my own,” she said while looking up and down her bare walls.
By Thursday, Perkins already had spent more than $400 out of her own wallet to buy storage items for her room and supplies for her students because she wasn’t sure how many would show up with supplies of their own. As she scoured the building, looking for a missing bookshelf and trying to nail down someone to move a filing cabinet into her room, Perkins also thought about the thing she was actually hired to do: Teach kids.
The struggles and anxieties of new teachers are exponential. Experts say many first-year teachers are overwhelmed when they actually take over their own classrooms. And without the right support, many leave the field quickly — up to 50 percent leave within the first year, studies show.