NPR – Cory Turner
“Sarah Hagan has a passion for math, and the pi-shaped pendant to prove it. The 25-year-old teaches at Drumright High School in Drumright, Okla. The faded oil town is easy to miss. Fewer than 3,000 people live there, and the highway humps right around it. There are no stoplights, no movie theater or bowling alley anymore. Just a clutch of small houses and hearty businesses: a funeral home, Family Dollar and a Dollar General. That makes it hard enough to attract good teachers, says Judd Matthes, Hagan’s principal. But it gets worse. “We don’t pay a lot in Oklahoma for beginning teachers,” he says, laughing from behind his desk in the school’s basement. “If you go next door to Arkansas, they’re about a $10,000-a-year starting salary difference.” Which made Matthes wonder why a National Merit Scholar who’d gotten a full-ride to the top-notch University of Tulsa would want to start her teaching life in a place like Drumright, earning just over $30,000 a year.”(more)