Sitting bored and having finished my assigned biology work, I started talking to my biology teacher, Kevin Ries. Small talk ensued, and somehow the conversation arrived at how he teaches biology at the Mesivta High School of`Greater Philadelphia twice a week. The idea that my teachers could have other jobs bewildered me, and it raised a question: how many other teachers here at LM have side hustles?
Ries’s side career at Mesivta started ten years ago, when the school was first founded. He, like many other LM teachers, was approached by their administration with an offer to teach two days a week after school. He decided it would be a good opportunity for him to not only spread his teaching, but also to help his daughters’ college funds. While he teaches at Mesivta two afternoons a week, he prioritizes his teaching career at LM as well as coaching the LM girls’ soccer team. Ries adds that he enjoys teaching at Mesivta for other reasons as well, elaborating, “I enjoy being busy and doing other things. I think my wife likes me being out of the house as much as possible, too.”
Math teacher Jeffrey Nyce teaches at My Turn to Drive, a driving school that gives driving lessons and administers driving tests to students, but he has yet another side hustle: Nyce is a real estate agent for Everyhome Realtors and works “primarily with friends and family, including a couple of people in our school at helping them buy or sell their homes.” Nyce works hard at these two side hustles primarily to support his children in the future and “hopefully help make life a little easier for my kids.” Math teacher by day, realtor and driving instructor by night, Nyce has been balancing these side hustles, selling and buying homes and teaching students how to drive, with his daily responsibilities of being a math teacher here at LM. To do so, he has relied on utilizing the extra time in the morning since start times changed as well as free periods to prepare his lesson plans and to grade his students’ work in order to free up time later in the day.
In most cases, teachers find a side hustle and stick with it, but Spanish teacher Tara Pellegrino has had quite a few over the years. She is in her seventeenth year of teaching and fifth year at LM, but she has been side hustling for most of her teaching career. She started off as a bartender, working every night Thursday to Saturday until four in the morning. As time passed, she grew less patient dealing with drunk people on a regular basis, and she found the late nights more and more tiring. COVID turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, leading her to decide to leave her bartending career behind her in order to spend more time with her family and to be less tired throughout the week. Now she is a nail technician and grocery store caterer; the hours are much more compatible with her other responsibilities. When asked how she balances all these professions and a family, Pellegrino stated, “I’m a machine. I work hard and I stay focused.”
Many other teachers have side hustles and other responsibilities outside of teaching at LM, many being unique and immensely beneficial to each teacher in all sorts of ways. So, next time your teacher doesn’t grade your assignments instantly, don’t blame them—grading isn’t their only responsibility.
However, all these teachers having side hustles begs the question: if LMSD is such a high-paying public school district, then why do many teachers still feel the need to have side hustles? Some teachers definitely decide to take on extra responsibilities just to fill up their schedules or to have work free from the frustration of pestering students, but still, many have side hustles for financial reasons. LMSD may be in the upper echelon of teacher wages, which means there are countless school districts across America that don’t pay their teachers nearly as much as LMSD does. What does this say about how school districts across the country pay their teachers?
Year after year public school teacher wages get worse and worse compared to the wages of other people with professional degrees. The rate at which it gets worse is only becoming more worrisome. In 2022, the pay gap between the average weekly pay of teachers and the average weekly pay of college graduates working in professions other than teaching has seen an increase of 2.9 percent, now reaching a total of 26.4 percent. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) states that this number has quadrupled since 1996. Teachers have been receiving increasingly unjustifiably low wages, especially when compared to people with the same levels of education.
Pennsylvania finds itself in the top fifteen highest teacher paying states, with LMSD having some of the highest wages out of all school districts in Pennsylvania. However, the average teacher starting salary in Pennsylvania is around $49,000, with the EPI estimating the minimum living wage to be around $57,500. LMSD is the second highest paid district in the state, with an average salary across all staff at around $110,000. If LM has the second highest paid staff in Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania as a state pays some of the highest wages to teachers, and many teachers within LM have side hustles, what does this mean for every other teacher in the country that isn’t fortunate enough to work at such a high paying district?
The cost of living is at an all time high, and it is unclear whether that will change in the near future. College prices are also at an all time high with no end in sight. Housing prices are through the roof and are becoming more and more unaffordable. According to the National Education Association, teacher wages aren’t even increasing to accommodate inflation. For many teachers that have families, need a home for their families, and have children, teacher wages—even at LM—aren’t always sufficient.
