Teacher Appreciation Week rolls around each year–an opportunity for students and families to share tokens of gratitude, and for principals and PTAs to make sure teachers are well-fed and well-stocked with snacks. Coffee bars appear. Catered lunches show up. Handwritten notes are passed across desks. For a brief moment, the community comes together to remind teachers that their hard work does not go unnoticed.
And those gestures matter. They do.
But for North Carolina teachers, the question lingers: is it enough?
Educators do not enter this profession for the money. They do it for the students sitting in front of them each day. For the spark when a concept finally clicks. For the relationships they build with families. For the quiet, powerful moments that never make headlines but shape lives in lasting ways.
But appreciation cannot be purely symbolic. Intrinsic rewards, as meaningful as they are, will not put gas in the car, pay a mortgage, or cover the cost of classroom supplies teachers too often purchase out of their own pockets.
And here’s where the disconnect becomes impossible to ignore.
Until the General Assembly–more specifically, Senate and House Republican leadership–finalizes a budget that meaningfully invests in teacher pay, the trends we’re already seeing will continue. Fewer people will enroll in educator preparation programs. More teachers will leave the profession. Teacher vacancies will grow. And ultimately, students will feel the impact through fewer supports, larger class sizes, and diminished opportunities to thrive.
For a long time, I believed the most valuable thing we could give teachers was time. Time to plan. Time to collaborate. Time to do the job well without being stretched impossibly thin. And while time is still critical, I can no longer pretend it is enough on its own.
Respect without compensation is not respect.
If we truly value teachers–if we want to show appreciation in a way that matches our rhetoric–then we have to be willing to invest in them. That starts with a state budget that prioritizes educator pay in a serious, sustained way.
Writer and scholar bell hooks wrote, “The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labour for freedom…as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.”
That idea should challenge all of us.
Because when we underinvest in teachers, we are underinvesting in possibilities and notions of freedom for our students. When we fail to assign real value to their work, we limit what students can access and achieve. And when appreciation becomes a substitute for action, we risk turning a week of gratitude into a quiet acceptance of the status quo.
So yes–bring the snacks. Write the thank-you notes. Cover a class so a teacher can take a real lunch break.
But don’t stop there.
Call your legislator. Send the email. Demand a budget that reflects the importance of the profession we claim to celebrate.
Because the most meaningful way to show up for teachers isn’t just with gratitude–it’s with action.
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