By Emma Croteau
Flatwater Free Press
Ella Ricker was sitting in her elementary school orchestra class when she first considered a career in teaching. Her orchestra teachers at Lincoln Public Schools made learning to play music so fun, she wanted to share that joy with others.
As a teacher, Ricker said, seeing her students excited to play their instruments and perform in school concerts was her favorite part of the job. But it was also only one part of a growing list of responsibilities in a profession in which she said a good work-life balance had become unattainable.
So, after nine years with LPS and 14 years into her career, Ricker left the profession last May — she would have to rely on income from pet-sitting until she could find something else. But a year later, she now watches people’s pets for a living, sometimes earning more than she did as a teacher, she said.
Ricker’s decision to quit teaching is an increasingly common one in Nebraska.
As of May 15, only 27,840 of the nearly 45,500 Nebraskans licensed to teach here have actually worked as teachers in the state this school year, according to a Flatwater Free Press analysis of state Department of Education data.
That means roughly 40% of certified Nebraska teachers aren’t teaching in public or private classrooms this academic year.
That number includes the normal churn, like retirements and teachers moving out of state or up into administrative roles, the department said. But it also includes many like Ricker — teachers who have exited the profession.
The Flatwater Free Press spoke with 13 former teachers who have left teaching. Many cited unsustainable, high-stress work environments with frequent expectations for unpaid labor and limited schedule flexibility. They noted shrinking student attention spans, additional learning requirements and feeling unsupported by parents or school leaders.
The teachers who spoke to Flatwater have retired early or left teaching for a range of careers in higher education, business, therapy, self-employment, healthcare and/or nonprofit work. Most said they would not return to the profession or would need to see major changes before doing so.
“Teaching is a relatively high-quit, turnover line of work,” said Richard Ingersoll, a former high school teacher himself who is now a professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
“The conventional wisdom is long that we have these shortages, that we don’t produce enough people … and then you look at the data and you find that, well, there’s actually a whole lot of people out there,” Ingersoll said. “The problem isn’t so much that we don’t produce enough (teachers), it’s that we lose too many.
“The issue is, well, can we keep them in the first place? But also, what does it take to get them to come back in?”
Ricker’s story mirrors others’ who say they had little choice but to leave the field. She frequently had to stay past school hours to attend mandatory meetings and trainings, she told Flatwater, without acknowledgment in her paycheck or from administrators for the extra time. That lack of recognition and support, she said, coupled with years of rising work demands, led her to quit after the 2025 school year.
“Every year I was teaching, they kept putting on more and more, like, things that we needed to do, more requirements we needed to meet,” Ricker said. “But we didn’t have any more time to do them.”
She knows other teachers who have left after feeling similarly burnt out. Many, she thinks, were dedicated educators who would worry about their students after school, then spend their evenings preparing for the next day’s classes.
“But there’s nothing to show for it at the end of the day, you know?” Ricker said.
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Nebraska’s teacher shortage has shown improvement, the state reported in its most recent teacher vacancy survey. Unfilled positions, classified as any left vacant or filled by someone other than a fully qualified teacher, dropped by around 669 to 489 from last school year to this year — a marked improvement from the over 900 reported in the 2023-2024 school year. The number of fully vacant positions has also decreased annually since.
But these survey reports can be imperfect indicators of how the state is actually trending, said Tim Royers, president of the state teachers union, the Nebraska State Education Association. He said the surveys are structured around posted positions that go unfilled.
“But I know that there’s districts across the state that have simply not posted a position because they know they won’t fill it, right?” Royers said. “So that doesn’t show up on that report.”
The problem is a national one. A 2025 survey from researchers at the University of Missouri found that 78% of teachers surveyed have considered or plan to leave teaching since the 2020 pandemic. Ingersoll said the profession has become more taxing as the demands on teachers have increased. “But, the time, the resources, the tools, the autonomy to meet the demands” haven’t. Teachers, he said, rarely get a say into the key decisions that impact their job.
Josh West, who taught math for seven years at Lincoln and Elkhorn Public Schools, said teaching became notably less enjoyable after the pandemic. Fewer students seemed to apply themselves, he said, and there was little support from the district to hold students accountable for their own progress in school.
He constantly worried over his students’ success, to the point where it wore on his mental health. He felt he was failing as an educator.
“I felt like I wasn’t making much of a difference,” West said. “It was making me anxious. I was not happy. I was emotionally exhausted at the end of every day.”
After the 2023 school year, West quit teaching with no backup plan. It was a big risk, he said, and it wasn’t easy to leave the job for which he’d obtained a degree or his position as a track and cross-country coach.
“You feel like you’ve gave up almost a decade of your life at that point,” West said. “You’ve put in all these years, and you’re almost starting from scratch again. And it was a scary feeling, not knowing for sure where I’d even be working.”
The hardest part for West: The feeling that he was giving up on his students. Those relationships are what he misses most about teaching, he said. Everything else made it easy to leave — the pressures from parents and principals, the feeling of running on empty with little time for life beyond work.
West eventually found a job with the state Department of Health and Human Services, where he took a small pay cut. He said it was worth it. Now, West works as an analyst for an insurance company, making more money than he ever did as a teacher, he said.
Teachers will leave the profession with no guarantee of a raise, with many taking a pay cut, said Gema Zamarro, a professor in education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas. They will sacrifice pay for a chance at a more manageable job, she said.
After the 2024 school year, Kate Geiger left her job as a special education teacher at a public elementary school in Omaha for an office manager position at an engineering firm. She also teaches yoga at an Omaha yoga studio, something she has done since she began teaching.
The career change has improved her schedule, mental health and salary.
“I’ve never cried at work,” she said. “I get lunch every single day if I want it.”
She recalls a moment in teaching where she wondered if she would have the time to attend a family member’s funeral. “That’s silly, right? But it was just, I mean, it was so hard to be able to do that stuff,” she said, especially when many students relied on her for individualized support.
People don’t realize the extent to which teachers’ workloads have grown in the last decade, said Kathy Poehling, the president of the Omaha Education Association, a local affiliate of the state teachers union. There is greater stress on teachers, she said, especially those in special education. They have more paperwork and complex regulations to navigate.
Geiger agrees the job changed in her eight years as a special education teacher. She said she loved her school and, for the majority of her career, enjoyed going to work. But her last year of teaching was so stressful, she said, that she was literally ripping strands of hair from her head.
“I struggled moving out of education because I really felt like I was making a difference in the world,” Geiger said. “But I was just like, I think, at my breaking point.”
Special education jobs continue to be the most difficult for schools to fill, topping the list for unfilled teacher positions reported by the state since at least 2009. Other specialized areas, including foreign language, music and advanced math and science, trend high on that list — industries that seek these skills tend to offer more competitive pay and benefits than teaching.
Many of the teachers with whom Flatwater spoke said they didn’t pursue the job for the pay, but cited money as another factor in their decision to leave.
According to a National Education Association report published in April, Nebraska’s starting salary for teachers, around $40,000, ranks second to last nationwide, above only Montana.
“I knew teaching wasn’t the best-paying job going into teaching,” West said. “But when you have all this other extra stuff on top of that, it’s just one other thing to add on the list of like, ‘Wait, why am I not doing another job that’s gonna pay more and will probably be better for my mental health?’”
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Multiple superintendents from public schools across the state said in emails and interviews with the Flatwater Free Press that they have been able to fill teacher vacancies in recent years, but that it has been challenging. The number of applicants continues to decline, they say — or there are none at all.
Royers said one of the best ways to tackle this shortfall is to focus hiring efforts on the overlooked group of people already certified to teach in Nebraska, by addressing the concerns that drove them out of the profession in the first place.
“We’re ignoring what we (as an organization) feel is a group that is job ready, has the skills, clearly, at one point, had the passion,” Royers said.
Ricker said she would have to see more support before ever considering a return to teaching orchestra. She’s still debating whether to renew her teaching certificate, which would expire in July.
It was hard to give up her health insurance as a teacher, she said, but the career switch has given her the ability to enjoy more of life. She can travel or watch events like the recent lunar flyby from home. “I’ve definitely noticed I’m happier and more calm this year,” she said.
Kael Welch, who taught for five years at Millard Public Schools and another five at Phoenix Academy in Omaha, said she thinks younger professionals have become better at prioritizing a work-life balance, whereas she never felt like she had that choice.
“I just thought it was expected of me to take all this work home and spend my own money in the classroom and spend my own free time, you know, doing things for work,” she said.
Welch’s sister, Erin Lane, taught fourth grade at Blair Community Schools for 15 years.
She retired early in 2022, a year after the school had returned to in-person learning after the coronavirus pandemic. But many of the responsibilities asked of teachers during the pandemic continued once it ended, she said, due to new technology and cleanliness requirements. Student behaviors also grew more disruptive and difficult to manage, she said.
Yet Lane said she loved when she would help a student learn something. She can still recall little details about her former students, like what they liked to read, and students whose graduation parties she’s now invited to. That was the magic in teaching, she said, when she knew she had made a lasting impact on a student.
Now, Lane said, those rewarding moments are too easily forgotten. “It feels like that’s kind of been beaten out of us,” she said. “And, if you don’t have that, then you’re really missing what teachers used to love about teaching.”
The Flatwater Free Press is Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.
