The Real Cost of Losing a Teacher

When a teacher hands in their resignation, what do you actually lose?

The standard answer focuses on recruitment costs. Posting the job, interviewing candidates, onboarding someone new. Maybe $15,000 to $20,000 per departure if you're tracking carefully.

But that calculation misses almost everything that matters.

The Costs Nobody Puts in a Spreadsheet

Consider what walks out the door with an experienced teacher:

The relationships with students who trusted them. The institutional memory of what worked and what didn't. The mentorship they provided newer staff without anyone asking. The curriculum refinements built over years of classroom testing.

Consider what happens to the teachers who stay:

They absorb extra duties. They watch another colleague leave. They start wondering if they should leave too. Morale doesn't decline linearly—it compounds.

Consider what happens to students:

Research consistently shows that teacher turnover hurts student achievement. Not just for students who lose their teacher directly, but for students throughout the building. Instability spreads.

The real cost of turnover isn't a line item. It's a cultural tax you pay every day in a hundred invisible ways.

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The Fantasy of the Endless Pipeline

There's a comforting belief among some administrators: if we lose one, we'll hire another.

The numbers don't support that belief anymore.

Teacher education enrollment has dropped significantly over the past decade. Fewer people are entering the profession. Meanwhile, 45% of current educators are considering leaving. Ontario alone projects needing over 1,200 additional teachers annually just to maintain current staffing.

The pipeline isn't endless. In some regions and subject areas, it's already dry.

Retention isn't just a nice-to-have. It's becoming the only viable strategy.

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Why Teachers Actually Leave

Exit interviews capture part of the story. "Better opportunity." "Family reasons." "Needed a change."

The deeper story is usually different.

Teachers leave when the gap between why they entered the profession and how they spend their days becomes unbearable. When administrative burden crowds out actual teaching. When they feel like they're drowning in disconnected systems while nobody notices. When the work stops feeling sustainable and starts feeling like survival.

They don't leave because they stopped loving students. They leave because the job stopped loving them back.

The CTF found that 80% of teachers struggle to cope with current working conditions. And 93% stay because of their students—not because of their systems.

That's a lot of love holding things together. Love alone isn't a retention strategy.

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What's Actually Within Your Control

You can't fix provincial funding formulas. You can't single-handedly solve class size issues. You can't change societal perceptions of the profession overnight.

But you control more than you might think.

You control whether your school's systems multiply effort or reduce it. Whether planning tools work together or force endless copying between tabs. Whether strategic priorities connect to daily classroom reality or float as abstract initiatives. Whether teachers feel supported by their technology or burdened by it.

The question isn't whether you can eliminate all the forces pushing teachers toward the exit.

The question is whether you're doing everything possible to make staying feel worthwhile.

At Lamppost, we build tools designed to give educators their time back—so the job feels sustainable, and the calling stays alive.

Because the best retention strategy isn't a program. It's a system that actually works.

Onward and upward,

—JBJL

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