Teaching “Not Right Profession To Be In To Get Rich”
Masaru Uchino said he never expected to get rich as a teacher. He received his training at California State University, Fullerton and took his first teaching job in Hawaii in September 2007. He is a third-grade classroom teacher at Momilani Elementary School in Pearl City.
“When I went into teaching, the main mantra I had for myself was ‘I’m not doing this for the money,'” Uchino, 32, told Civil Beat.
He is aware, though, of a big discrepancy between what he is paid here and what he would have been paid if he had taken a job in one of the California school systems where he first applied. Teacher salaries in Hawaii are low when compared with nationwide teacher salaries after taking into account the price of paradise. (Read more about teacher compensation in Hawaii by visiting our teacher compensation topic page.)
Uchino said he didn’t have a choice but to commit to teaching in Hawaii two years ago because he wanted to be closer to his parents, who had moved here. But he’s happy here and hasn’t picked up on a lot of dissatisfaction among teachers with their wages.
“From who I’ve talked to in terms of other teachers, I think most are used to what they have,” Uchino said. “So rather than looking at it as a glass-half-empty with pessimistic thinking, we try to remember that we live on a beautiful island and have all the vacation time we need. There are definitely perks of living here in Hawaii that make up for not having an additional X amount of dollars.”
Most teachers in Hawaii work a 10-month year and have 29 days off during the school year. Uchino said teachers are trying to hold on to what they have. “We don’t want to lose anything else.”
Granted, he said, most of the teachers he’s spoken with about compensation have been in the system more than 10 years and have thus moved to the far end of Hawaii’s teacher pay scale.
“If anything, I’ve heard complaints about the difference in how much teachers were being paid when they started and how much we’re being paid now that we’re starting out,” he said.
Entry-level teachers from the mainland — like Uchino — make about $10,000 less than their counterparts who completed a here in Hawaii.
Uchino is also young and single without any children, so he said he doesn’t worry a lot about the specifics of his compensation. Other teachers and even the school system may not be able to afford to ignore them. Some teachers struggle to make ends meet. He did observe that Furlough Fridays last year hit some of his colleagues pretty hard. The furloughs, which were equivalent to a roughly 8 percent pay cut for the year, were especially difficult for families in which both spouses worked for the Department of Education.
“For the most part though, teachers are pretty resilient,” he said. “Most teachers I’ve observed aren’t wasteful spenders and are pretty frugal with what they have. The bottom line is that they’re teaching because they enjoy the profession and not because they enjoy the compensation. If you’re doing it for the money, it’s not the right profession to be in to get rich.”
