By Greg Childress

NC Newsline

Recruiting effective teachers to Bertie County is difficult work. Keeping them in the rural, northeastern county is challenging, as well.

Bertie County Schools had the second highest attrition rate among state school districts in the 2021-22 school year, according to the most recent data available. Its attrition rate was 25.8%, meaning one in four teachers left the district.

Part of the problem had been the county didn’t pay teachers a local salary supplement, which made the district less competitive in the regional scramble to recruit good teachers. Supplements are paid from local funds. It’s money teachers receive on top of state pay.

“Rural communities like Bertie (County) often lose out attracting viable candidates to urban areas where there is shopping, great restaurants, entertainment and other amenities,” BCS Superintendent Otis Smallwood told Newsline via email. “In addition, Bertie County Schools is not able to pay teachers large local supplements like larger districts. Layer all of that with inadequate housing and you have a recipe for not being able to attract enough talent to educate the youth in our community. In many instances, we have to rely on recruiting international teachers.”

Convincing country commissioners to kick in extra money for salary supplements was a top priority for Smallwood when he returned to the county to lead the school district in 2019. He grew up there and is a 1989 graduate of Bertie High School.

“We were one of only three counties that did not have a (salary) supplement and when I presented that to commissioners, it kind of shamed them, so they gave me money,” Smallwood said during a recent State Board of Education meeting.

Smallwood traveled the 117 miles from the town of Windsor to Raleigh last week to share the district’s newest recruitment and retention strategy: Dream Pointe Apartments, a $4.3 million, 24-unit, two-bedroom apartment complex the district has built to provide housing for teachers. Affordability and accessibility are both big concerns for teachers recruited to the county.

Dream Pointe will house as many as 40 teachers when it opens in July. Apartments will go to teachers with the greatest needs.

“The next challenge (after the local teacher supplement) was we knew teachers needed a place to stay,” Smallwood said. “We knew our attrition rate was high, well above the state average … and we knew our bigger challenge in rural, northeastern North Carolina is housing.”

A recent report by the North Carolina Housing Coalition shows that 50 percent of renters in Bertie County have difficulty affording their homes. A person would need to earn $17.38 an hour to afford the $904 monthly fair market rent in the low-wealth county. Fair market rent has increased 17 percent since last year and 33 percent over the last five years.

Dream Pointe apartments will rent for $800 a month, which is $104 below the $904 fair market rate cited by the Housing Coalition.

Across the state, the Housing Coalition found that 48 percent — 604,365 households — of renters have difficulty affording their homes. Families that spend more than 30 percent of income on rent are considered cost-burdened. Those who spend more than 50 percent are severely cost-burdened.   

Twenty-eight percent of renters and homeowners — 1.1 million households in North Carolina — are cost-burdened by high rents or mortgage payments, according to the Housing Coalition.

Teacher housing is typically needed in rural areas, such as Bertie County and communities where the cost of living is high, said Angie Mullennix, director of Innovative Practices and Programs at the state Department of Public Instruction. “It’s difficult for a two-income family to purchase a home, especially with interest rates being high or it’s a rural area where there just aren’t houses available,” Mullennix said.

Teacher housing is not a new concept in Bertie County. In 2017, former superintendent Elaine White asked the Bertie Board of County Board of Commissioners to fund a teacher housing initiative as part of the district’s budget.

As reported by the News-Herald, White told county commissioners that only two of 17 newly hired teachers were able to find suitable living quarters and that the district was at risk of losing teachers to surrounding school districts.

Bertie’s teacher housing project was a “go” in 2019 but was derailed by the pandemic, which caused supply chain issues, worker shortages and other challenges.

The teacher housing project Dream Pointe was revived by Smallwood and the Partners for Bertie County Public Schools Foundation, which secured a $3.1 million loan from the State Employees’ Credit Union Foundation. The Golden LEAF Foundation kicked in a $527,000 grant and the Town of Windsor, Bertie County and the school district each contributed $160,000.

School districts across the country are using teacher housing to recruit and to retain educators. Due to rising housing costs, many educators cannot afford to live in the communities where they teach. A National Education Association report found that nearly a quarter of teachers who left the profession said housing incentives such as relocation reimbursement, reduced rent, down payment incentives or reduced mortgage rates would be extremely important or very important in whether they return to the profession.

North Carolina already has several affordable housing projects for teachers. Duke TeachHouse in Durham, for example, is a living and learning community for early career teachers and graduates of Duke University’s teacher preparation programs. Others include Williams Baldwin Court in Asheville for teachers who work for Buncombe County Schools and Asheville City Schools, and Hertford Pointe in Ahoskie for Hertford County Schools’ teachers. The Dare County Education Foundation offers 24 housing units in Kill Devil Hills and 12 units in Hatteras for teachers employed by Dare County Schools.

The county’s teacher housing complexes have been “huge assets” in recruiting and retaining teachers to the affluent, coastal community where teachers are often priced out of the housing market, said Barbara Davidson, the foundation’s director.

The units currently rent for about 50 percent below market rate, which is $1,050 for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment, Davidson said. “In Dare County, we have a huge shortage of long-term housing inventory, it’s practically non-existent because of the tourist industry that drives our community. There’s incredible limited inventory and that’s the bigger issue.”

Even though rents are well below market rate, Dare County’s teacher housing is still out of reach for some first-year teachers, who earn $37,676 per year, not including a local supplement.

Davidson said because of expensive rents — a studio apartment can cost $2,100 a month — there’s a long waiting list for teacher housing.

Most on the wait list will never get placed in teaching housing. Newcomers for difficult-to-fill and long-vacant positions are prioritized, Davidson said.

Dare County is planning to expand its teacher housing program. The Dare County Board of Commissioners has given the foundation $1 million to build new units.

“Demand has outpaced our supply by more than we ever anticipated,” Davidson said.