The average home price in Cashiers is $1.4 million. The starting salary for a first-year teacher in North Carolina is in the low $40,000s. 

These two figures present a challenge for Jackson County Public Schools when it comes to recruiting and hiring teachers at Blue Ridge School and Blue Ridge Early College, which share a joint PreK through high school campus at the southern end of the county. Unless someone is independently wealthy or has family land, no one can afford to live in the community, and the other places to live are a long and windy drive away.

“It is so bad everywhere in Jackson County, and it is catastrophically bad in Cashiers,” said Jake Buchanan, JCPS deputy superintendent. “There has never been a worse time to recruit staff for the school system because of the housing costs than right now.”

Despite this challenge, Blue Ridge School principal Rayna Crisp said she was proud to share that Blue Ridge School’s Pre-K through sixth grade teaching positions are fully staffed for the upcoming school year, an achievement she attributes the school’s positive workplace culture.

Still, she said teacher retention is a challenge in rural communities like Cashiers.

“The cost of living in the Cashiers area is beyond what many educators and support staff can reasonably afford, requiring many employees to commute from surrounding communities such as Cullowhee, Sylva, Macon County, Brevard or neighboring counties in South Carolina and Georgia,” Crisp said. “While those distances may not appear significant in miles, mountain roads, elevation changes and winding terrain result in longer travel times and increased vehicle wear, maintenance and fuel costs.”

Though the high cost of living has been an issue in retaining a stable workforce for all employers in Cashiers for years, the issue of teacher pay has come to head recently, as Jackson County commissioners and school board members discussed what could be done about it at their July 9 meeting.

While commissioners and school board members clashed when it came to funding for school district capital projects, they seemed to be in agreement that if they wanted to keep Blue Ridge School well staffed, they’d have to start paying more.

Commissioner Michael Jennings, who lives in Cashiers, brought up the topic at the July 9 meeting and said that teachers having to drive long distances is not sustainable. In a later interview with The Smoky Mountain News, he said he regularly hears his constituents ask for better conditions for teachers and students at Blue Ridge School. Not only are plans for capital improvement projects at the school stalled as commissioners and school board members squabble over how much funding the school should get and for what projects, but routine maintenance projects to fix issues like leaky roofs have also gone at a snail’s pace, according to some in the community.

Couple that with the fact that Blue Ridge School offers fewer Career and Technical Education classes than other schools in the county, and many Cashiers locals feel like they seem to get the short end of the stick an awful lot, especially given that the majority of the tax base for Jackson County comes from the Cashiers end of the county.

“It’s a real tight-knit community,” Jennings said. “People help each other and work together a lot, but there is just not enough. There’s not enough opportunity for those kids. It’s leaving those kids behind, in my opinion, not offering them anything that the rest of the county would get.”

Crisp remains positive about the school’s outlook and focuses on aspects of the workplace she can control like fostering a positive culture, providing instructional support, encouraging collaboration, recognizing staff accomplishments and helping teachers maintain a healthy work-life balance. She also pointed to their partnership with Blue Ridge School Education Foundation, which helps fund teacher support and additional educational opportunities for students, as a big help for the Blue Ridge School community.

Her hope is that collaboration with community leaders, local government and education partners will lead to solutions.

For some teachers, however, the pay remains prohibitive despite enjoying their time in the classroom. Cashiers resident Reagan Bunch taught at Blue Ridge School for the last two years but will not be returning in the fall. She said she couldn’t live on her salary of $44,000 a year even after she moved into a fixer-upper R.V. on family land. Now that she’s no longer a county employee and can speak more freely on the conditions at Blue Ridge School, Bunch felt compelled to advocate for the teachers who choose to stay.

“I get discouraged when I look to my future and see veteran teachers with 20-plus years of experience earning only $5,000 more than I would annually,” Bunch said. “Jackson County could attract veteran teachers with an experience-based county supplement applied county-wide.”

The county offers an annual supplement of $2,200 for certified staff and $800 for non-certified staff, lower than what the school board originally asked from commissioners, which was $3,000 and $1,500 for certified and non-certified staff respectively. Additionally, the supplement is not tied to experience, meaning that a first-year teacher and a veteran teacher would receive the same amount. Bunch said having the supplement come from a percentage of the teacher’s salary would be a better way to divvy out the money, as a 20-year teacher would receive more for their experience.

With the cost of living at an all-time high in Cashiers, it seems commissioners might be more willing to shell out additional county money to help ameliorate the problem.

“If the state won’t pay more, the county’s going to have to pay a little bit more for these teachers and staff, for the kids, or it’s going to eventually be a real struggle,” Jennings said. “I am willing. I’m not saying that we’d have to raise taxes to do that because there’s plenty of spending right now that’s not necessary, in my opinion, and I voiced quite of bit of that at the budget meetings we had, but I think some of that money that we’re spending elsewhere in other departments could be used more so for the schools than where it’s going now.” 

And according to Bunch, the county better take these considerations seriously. Despite school pride, morale can be low.

“Everybody’s proud to be a Bobcat,” she said. “There’s resilience and everything, but they just don’t feel appreciated, and it’s really easy to not feel appreciated when you’re doing multiple jobs and you’re only paid for one. Among students, it’s kind of like we’re just the rugrat public school in Cashiers.”

These resentments are only on the rise as the county considers spending tens of millions of dollars on capital projects, like the proposed Smoky Mountain Middle School,especially when it feels like the purse strings are tight when it comes to Cashiers projects.  

Bunch isn’t married and doesn’t have kids, but she wants to stay in the community. She wonders, when she does have kids, will Blue Ridge School still be in good shape when it’s time for them to go there?

“I still care about those kids that are there and all those teachers that are there, and some of them can’t go speak because they’re still employed,” she said.

For Buchanan, the only tools he really has now to address teacher recruitment and retention at Blue Ridge School are workplace culture and climate. Budget talks are over until next summer.

The good news is that because teaching at the school requires either an exorbitant rent or mortgage payment every month, or a lengthy and mountainous commute, for a teacher to stay, they must be passionate about their school and their kids. The unfortunate news is that for many, even passion isn’t enough to keep them in Cashiers. And though the problem is the worst in Cashiers, the cost of living is also too high for many across the rest of Jackson County.

“It will take us longer to find somebody on average at Blue Ridge,” Buchanan said. “But I think as an entire district, Cashiers and the rest of the district, we see this as quite possibly the biggest challenge we face in the next 10 years.”