• By Diego Aranguiz Mourgues, High School Senior • IDRA Newsletter • September 2024 •

As a part of IDRA’s Youth Advisory Board, I have had the opportunity to work and bring a few of my ideas to fruition. One of the ideas was a survey of teachers in my school district. I wanted to pursue this project because my mother is an educator and would often tell me the struggles she has faced as an educator, so naturally, I was intrigued.

I asked myself, is this just a small issue that only she is facing? Or is this a bigger problem that multiple teachers are facing, and is this more of a problem than I thought? This could affect not only teachers in my mother’s district but also mine and Texas, possibly even nationally.

These questions were just some of the reasons I decided to conduct a teacher survey to understand the challenges educators are facing day to day in the classroom and on campus. Overall, my aim was to understand how students and teachers can work together to improve campus culture and climate at our school.

I recruited teachers from my San Antonio high school who teach different subjects in order to collect a melting pot of responses that could help me strengthen the data. This strategy was to ensure I collected a broad, diverse view of teachers’ struggles. I used the data I collected to evaluate the issues teachers are experiencing on our campus and inform sustainable solutions to address teachers’ concerns.

One finding that stuck out to me was that all teachers who took my survey mentioned that a big part of a student being successful in the classroom is having a safe school climate.

My survey included items that asked teacher respondents to rank the severity of common issues in the education space, including teacher burnout, staffing shortages, hiring and retention, diversity hiring, campus climate and school funding. Additionally, I included questions that asked teachers about what kinds of resources they needed to teach effectively.

According to my survey results, one of the main issues teachers at my school are facing is educator burnout. Teachers rated it as one of the most severe issues they were struggling with, which supports previous research and the hundreds of stories about this issue, especially prevalent during COVID-19 (Cardona, 2024).

My findings were not shocking; rather, this validated something that I feel like all teachers in Texas and even across the nation are sadly facing. They feel burned out with few resources to help them, as we have been seeing in teacher shortages more and more. Staffing issues followed close behind in the survey as one of the main concerns teachers had that impacted their confidence to teach students effectively.

While Likert scale items made up most of my survey, I also asked several questions to hear directly from teachers’ voices about their unique experiences. Many teachers expressed concerns surrounding my district’s lack of parent support, student vaping, too many coaches as teachers, lack of time for planning and much more.

Two teacher respondents said that one of our school’s biggest issues is “overcrowding everywhere, which impedes the quality of education,” and “explosive growth of population and not enough open campuses.” This was something that I completely agree with as I have felt that overcrowding has been a huge issue for my campus.

One last finding that stuck out to me was that all teachers who took my survey mentioned that a big part of a student being successful in the classroom is having a safe school climate, which most importantly includes mental health resources. I believe that this clearly shows that without good, strong mental health support, a student will not fully feel engaged in the classroom, no matter how much an educator tries to improve their teaching or classroom environment.

While these are preliminary findings from my recent survey research, I am eager to share with the community a complete report soon. Additionally, I wanted to thank the teachers who volunteered their time for this survey. Their responses helped me and hopefully will be helpful to others.

Resources

Cardona, M. (February 28, 2024). Survey: Texas public school educators feeling burnout as districts face funding issues. KERA.

Diego Aranguiz Mourgues is a high school junior in San Antonio and a member of IDRA’s Youth Advisory Board.

[© 2024, IDRA. This article originally appeared in the September edition of the IDRA Newsletter. Permission to reproduce this article is granted provided the article is reprinted in its entirety and proper credit is given to IDRA and the author.]

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