During the pandemic, Chalkbeat published dozens of essays that spoke to the tumult of COVID-era teaching and how COVID-19 reshaped educators’ lives. Lindsay Klemas wrote about teaching on Zoom while caring for a toddler. Canwen Xu recounted what it was like to be a first-year educator at the height of COVID. Walt Stallings wrote about the particular vulnerability of substitutes during school closures, and George Farmer discussed the challenge of building parent-teacher relationships from a distance.

In one memorable Chalkbeat essay, Katie Kraushaar, now Katie Hicks, wrote that the pandemic revealed that “to teach is to martyr.” When educators returned to classrooms after lockdowns, many of them struggled, Hicks said, demonstrating how COVID-19 reshaped educators’ lives. “Schools are relying on the mental well-being of teachers,” she wrote, “and there’s not enough to go around.”

Two months later, Hicks — then a middle school English teacher in St. Louis — announced on Twitter, now X, that she had reached a tipping point. Her exit after 12 years in the field was part of a broader exodus of teachers following COVID school closures. Several states experienced record teacher turnover, and some schools reported unprecedented mid-year exits.

Hicks said while she still loved her students and her colleagues, she hated what school had become. “I could blame the pandemic, politics, parents or some other word that starts with the letter P,” she wrote on Twitter. “But it doesn’t really matter. I needed to break up with teaching.”

These days, Hicks lives in Florida and works in health care advocacy. Despite her career change, “who I am as an educator shows up every single day: in how I am raising my son, in my current profession outside of education, in how I treat and interact with other people,” she told Chalkbeat. In an interview coinciding with the fifth anniversary of the COVID school closures, Hicks, who now lives in Florida, reflected on what communities have come to expect from teachers, how educators showed up for each other during pandemic schooling, and what school leaders can do to support teachers who are facing burnout.

Read the full article about how COVID-19 reshaped educators’ lives by Gabrielle Birkner at Chalkbeat.