A Valuable Change: One Teacher’s Journey in Deciding to Change Schools

In 2023, I had what many people consider a “dream gig” in education: I had a district-level position coaching early-career teachers. Not only did I enjoy nurturing future educators and making an impact on my district far beyond my own classroom, the position came with a flexible schedule, abundant resources and professional development, supportive colleagues and administrators, and a yearly stipend above my teaching salary. I woke up every day feeling energized, and motivated to go to work and was finally feeling like my expertise was valued.

And then, a year later, I did something no one including myself could have anticipated: I walked away from that “dream” job. So, what changed?

Turn and Face the Strain

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that my husband and I welcomed our first child in August 2023. Despite initial hesitations of returning to work as a new mom, I quickly regained the energy, motivation, and joy for my job that I had before I became a mother. However, there was another practical change to consider, which was the change of commute. I didn’t move, and my job didn’t move, but my corner of California is one of the few areas still growing in population. While my route didn’t change, nor did the mileage, the same streets and freeways were suddenly flooded with more cars and moved a lot slower. As a result, I went from spending less than an hour a day in my car to nearly two hours just going to and from work. While that extra hour previously meant that I would have less time to workout or prepare lessons, now this extra hour meant losing out on precious time with my ever-changing infant. As it was, I was spending about one and a half hours a day with my son when he was awake, and the irony of that time being about as long as I was spending in the car each day was not lost on me. Without that commute, I would be saving gas and wear on my car, and stress about getting to the daycare before our pickup time, but I would also be saving time. Without that commute, I could have doubled my time with my child each day, time that I could have spent reading to him, playing with him, and getting to know the human I made. I felt torn between the time I spent doing what I loved and time I spent with people I loved, and with that came immense guilt. Yet I felt both a desire for change and the inertia of keeping things as they were.

I Turned Myself to Face Me

The force that overcame that inertia came from an unexpected source: coaching. As part of my coaching work, we were asked to engage the teachers we were coaching in an exercise from Elena Aguilar to identify their core values in order to examine how those values were showing up in their practice. In this tool, you are given a large list of core values that apply to your work and personal life (ex: Flexibility, Connection, Truth, Service, etc.). You begin by circling the top 10 that you feel most resonate with you, then you narrow down that list until you are left with the 3 core values you feel are the most core to your being. I engaged in this activity alongside my coachees in order to build a sense of solidarity, develop a common understanding of each other’s values, and deepen a sense of trust in our coaching relationship. As I completed this exercise multiple times with the teachers I coached, I noticed that “sustainability” (my own addition to the list – not surprising for someone who once tracked every single hour I worked in a year) and “community” came up frequently as part of my top core values. In my 5th or 6th time doing this exercise, sitting in a windowless elementary staff lounge across from one of the teachers I worked with, circling words on a piece of paper while dread for my drive home hovered in the back of my mind, it hit me: I was unhappy not because of the demands of my job, my family, or my commute but because my life was out of alignment with the values I had chosen on the page in front of me.

If I said I valued sustainability, then why was I spending so much time and resources just in the mere act of getting to work? If I said I valued community, then why didn’t I serve the students in the neighborhood where I lived? I recalled that before I moved to my current city, I really enjoyed the times I would see students and families on random trips around town, and how I had lost that (but gained some privacy) when I moved a city away. Once I had identified that I was no longer living in these values, the question became “How can I change my life to be more in alignment with community and sustainability?” With my husband, I examined our options:

1. We could move our family closer to my work

• This would allow me to stay in my dream gig and stay connected to a district that I had spent the last eight years in. The city and the school district that served the city were both familiar places to me, as I had spent most of my teenage and college years in that area. I knew the different communities and neighborhoods well, and I drew a lot of comfort from that knowledge. However, I also really enjoyed the city where I was currently living, and my husband also expressed a desire to have our family stay there since that was where his job was located.

2. Or I could move my work closer to our family.

• This would allow me to live out my values by teaching in a much smaller city. The idea of really embedding in a community that is smaller and tight-knit was exciting to me. However, the loss of job security and returning as a probationary employee was also uncomfortable. Additionally, what if I got into the district. . . and had a bad experience working there? Where would I go then?

Both options would have required a large financial sacrifice, either in the form of a significant pay cut by moving to a new district or by having to find a new (and likely more expensive) place to live. In the end, we decided that the sting of a pay cut would win out over moving, and it would allow me to prioritize my top values: sustainability and community. All that was left to do was to apply for jobs in my neighborhood school district and hope for the best.

Ch-Ch-Changes

After two months of searching and then another month on the interview circuit for my local school district, I accepted a position at a high school less than 10 minutes from my house, and the difference was immediate and compounding. The first change was the immediate effect of having an hour or more of my day back: teaching actually feels like a sustainable career again. This job really does demand a significant portion of my time and energy, and having even just an extra few minutes a day to spend grading papers and preparing lessons has made an immense difference in my sense of effectiveness and joy in my work.

The change in schools has also brought back my sense of community. Not only did I find an amazing group of colleagues to work with (though my old ones were amazing, too!), but I enjoyed the renewed, unplanned moments of connecting with students and parents in the checkout line of the grocery store. I’ve had more time and energy for engaging with my neighbors, who are largely my colleagues – it turns out a coworker lives about five doors down from me, and many more coworkers live within walking distance of my house. Now that I have met these neighbors through work, we have shared front yard talks, playdates, and glasses of wine together.

But my favorite change has been the extra time I get to spend with my son. My daily time with him has doubled since making the switch, and now we have fallen into a comfortable after-work routine that has the whole family eating dinner that I prepared together, then I get to play with him while my husband does the dishes. While the specifics of what we end up doing changes every day, this has resulted in a tighter bond between the whole family and we truly enjoy our time together after work. As my son grows, I look forward to being able to take the time I formerly spent commuting and enroll him in a sport or some other activity he’s interested in to develop his own interests and his own community ties.

Still Don’t Know What I Was Waiting For

What was one of the most difficult decisions of my career turned out to be one of the best. If your work is feeling stale, overwhelming, or you feel resentment creeping in, you can try the core values exercise for yourself (warning: it’s harder than it seems).

Once you’ve completed the exercise and identified your top 3 core values, you can use the reflection questions to help you guide the next steps:

1. What surprised you in the process of choosing your top core values?
2. In what ways are you expressing your top core values in your day-to-day life? How are these values not being expressed?
3. What changes could you envision in order to bring your life closer to your living core values? What are some barriers to these changes?
4. What is something you can do tomorrow to shift your life closer to these values?

It might not lead you to something radical, like a career change, but it might lead you to make smaller changes that help you live in better alignment with your own values.

References

Aguliar, E. (2025). Identifying core values. Bright Morning. https://content.app-us1.com/ZzEmW/2025/07/28/93747c37-4a77-49a5-b70f-2f5a6d8ae699.pdf