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Every time Hunter Sandlin ran the air conditioner in his fourth grade classroom at Willow Oaks Elementary School, water would pour out onto the floor.
“Turning off the air conditioner wasn’t really an option because the room would get to be like 100 degrees,” Sandlin said. “So, I went out and bought a squeegee and a bunch of cleanup stuff, and I was constantly, like six times a day, slopping this water back up.”
He moved students and desks away from the flood zone. When a fine black film appeared on the floor and class materials, he worried it could be mold.
Sandlin filed maintenance requests, but the fixes were only temporary. The recurring leak was just one more challenge in his classroom, along with broken desks and not enough textbooks.
Frustrated, Sandlin left his job at the end of last school year.
He joined an exodus of other Memphis teachers leaving the district. According to state data, in 2024, nearly 20% of educators resigned from Tennessee’s largest school district compared with around 12% statewide.
Teachers are fleeing Memphis schools just as the district is fighting for its independence against an impending state takeover. Research has linked high teacher turnover to declines in test scores and lower math and reading achievement, particularly in low-performing and predominantly Black schools.
The stakes are especially high in Memphis, where schools facing the most persistent learning gaps often also have the most teachers leaving each year. Mt. Pisgah Middle and High School, one of 14 MSCS schools facing increased intervention for repeatedly failing the state rating system, lost around two-thirds of its teachers in the 2024-25 school year, according to state data.
Middle College High, which received the top state rating that year, didn’t lose a single teacher.
Chalkbeat talked to 10 former and current MSCS educators about their reasons for leaving their positions or why they’ve seen colleagues leave. All but Sandlin declined to be named in fear of retaliation.
A decade-long MSCS social studies teacher left because of constantly changing district policies. One early-career elementary teacher quit because there wasn’t enough student behavior support. A handful of others said they left after disagreements with school leaders over how to run their classrooms.
While retention data for the 2025-26 school year is not yet available, teacher vacancies worsened in MSCS this year. In an August survey, only 35% of school leaders said that every teaching position was “filled and in place” by the first day of class, down from 41% last year.
Superintendent Roderick Richmond said the district has hosted seven job fairs to fill empty teaching positions, 230 of which had no pending offers earlier this year. He also said MSCS raised teacher salaries by 2% and is offering $1,000 bonuses for teachers to stay in their schools year after year.
“I want everybody to have a competitive wage,” Richmond said in an August board meeting. “I want us to be able to retain every single teacher. I’m committed to that, but we just have a lot of different factors that we have to consider.”
Why are teachers leaving MSCS?
There’s no single reason why teachers nationwide leave the profession. Unlike some other districts, MSCS doesn’t conduct exit interviews with resigning teachers, making local trends harder to identify.
Sandlin became a teacher after working as a respiratory therapist and TV programmer for most of his career. He had a rocky first year, he said, and his students struggled on state standardized tests. But by his second year, Sandlin was seeing progress.
“And I was like, ‘All right, something’s clicking. I’m figuring this out,’” he said. “So leaving, it wasn’t even on my mind.”
But Sandlin said a lack of classroom resources impeded student learning. He noticed “night and day” disparities between his classroom — full of neighborhood-assigned students — and classrooms for children who opted into Willow Oaks’ advanced art and science programs.
The desks in Sandlin’s classroom were “ancient,” he said, requiring multiple repairs, and he never received enough textbooks for each student.
“I want to say I had 42 kids, and I had about 23 books,” he said.
Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, said educators also often leave because of issues with school leaders.
“Principals set the direction for the culture of a school,” she said. “They support working conditions in which teachers thrive or in which they feel like they can just barely survive.”
Nearly one-quarter of MSCS teachers said in last year’s state-run survey that they don’t like how their school is run. The district was not included in the 2026 survey because not enough educators responded.
JC Bowman, director of the statewide advocacy group Professional Educators of Tennessee, said low response rates are common because some educators fear facing consequences for speaking out.
That’s especially true when it comes to issues with administrators, Bowman said. He said districts should hire outside organizations to run teacher surveys each year and focus more on training principals, especially those early in their career.
“They often haven’t learned how to manage people effectively yet,” he said. “We put all the emphasis on teachers as the weak area … but I think to really improve public schools, we have to focus on administrators.”
Sandlin said there aren’t effective channels to hold Memphis school leaders accountable. At Willow Oaks, he said, teachers can submit a complaint to the principal advisory board, but there’s no requirement for the principal to respond or act on those reports.
MSCS Director of Strategic Communications Terrica Cleaborn-Thornton said in an email that teachers can report issues through an online form on the district’s HR website. The district’s Office of Employee and Labor Relations investigates those complaints.
What can MSCS do to keep more teachers around?
Sandlin said he didn’t want to leave his job. In fact, he’s still looking for a teaching role at a different MSCS school or in another district.
“I loved the kids and the community and the families,” he said. “But I just didn’t like the way the admin talked to me, and the facilities that I had compared to other sections in my grade.”
Cleaborn-Thornton said the district could not find any record of daily flooding at Willow Oaks, but did identify classrooms with upwards of eight leak-related work orders over the past two years. That represents a “relatively limited number of occurrences,” she said, given that HVAC systems run year-round.
She added that the district “continues to implement targeted strategies to support educators and strengthen retention, particularly in hard-to-staff schools and critical shortage areas.”
But Peske said MSCS is missing a strategy that has helped boost teacher retention elsewhere: differential teacher pay. That could mean offering higher salaries to teachers in high-need subjects or schools, she said, or tying pay to performance.
That teacher pay model was one of the biggest reforms ushered in by new state-appointed leadership in Houston public schools, where salaries now range from $64,000 to $101,000 based on test scores and school need. Memphis teachers earn just over $65,000 per year on average, with a starting salary of just over $51,000.
Tennessee Republicans want to use Houston as a model to assert control over Memphis schools and improve district performance. But Houston’s takeover sparked a massive teacher exodus still being felt three years later — and it remains unclear whether the new pay scale will keep more teachers from leaving.
Memphis’ superintendent also warned in August that raising teacher pay too much would hurt the district’s annual budget and further limit staffing.
“If we continue to increase our expenses, we only have one place to cut, and then that’s going to be employees,” Richmond said.
Bri Hatch covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Bri at bhatch@chalkbeat.org.