Nurses salary vrs teacher's salary

Nurses General Nursing

Published

There was an article in our local paper about a teacher who just lost his job for "fratanizing" with a senior student. The paper states that his base salary was $67,000 a year. My reaction was:idea: I started to do some math. Based on 185 day/year school year that is $362.16/day. OR 45.27/hour. No weekends, no holidays and summers off. Hmmm, maybe I am the stupid one.

I am afraid you are misinformed that teachers get the whole summer off or that we don't do weekends. Sorry, but as I teacher I went back to school 2 weeks earlier than my students and I spent a great deal of my time during the summer preparing lesson plans and looking for resources for the up coming year. Also, I had inservices on saturdays or sometimes even saturday school. I wasn't a coach but if you look at their schedule, it is even worse!!!

By the way, I am still a nursing student (who has two masters and taught for 4 years) and sometimes I think the big difference is really one of responsibility. If I screwed up in my class or didn't cover a topic thoroughly enough, the worse that would happen is that the student may do poorly on the state exam. Not good, but certainly not that big a deal. On the other hand, if I make a mistake as a nurse, people could be hurt or killed. I am so lucky I am still a student with a great preceptor. Sometimes when I think of all the responsibility I get so scared. But hey, at least nobody is cursing at me or threatening me.:eek:

Specializes in ED, Cardiac Medicine, Retail Health.

In my neck of the woods (Boston) a new teacher working in the Boston public school system starts at $48,000 a year. A new nurse working at a Boston hospital start at $60.000 a year not counting shift diffs. If you include the shift diff, it is $67.000 a year (since we know that newbies often do every other weekend and plenty of nights).

Both jobs are hard and and full of stress!

There was an article in our local paper about a teacher who just lost his job for "fratanizing" with a senior student. The paper states that his base salary was $67,000 a year. My reaction was:idea: I started to do some math. Based on 185 day/year school year that is $362.16/day. OR 45.27/hour. No weekends, no holidays and summers off. Hmmm, maybe I am the stupid one.

Not all teachers make that. My son's 1st grade teacher just retired this year after teaching for almost 20 years. She took a leave for a while to raise her kids, but had been teaching steadily for the past 15 years or so. She told me she was making $60,000 then. This is after almost 20 years in it, with a masters. We're also in one of the highest paying states for teachers. Not the absolute highest, but probably the top 5.

Specializes in Day program consultant DD/MR.

My friend is a social studies teacher for a small high school. She makes $45,000 a year and has 2 years of experience. While her in class clock time is 7:30 to 2:30 she spends aon average another 3-4 hours a night preparing and grading. She was lucky and only went back to school 2days before students did but as others have stated she did have to spend time during the summer break doing lesson plans and such for the upcoming year. Salaries here for RN are $55,000-$74,000. Lvn $36,000 to $51,000. So I guess it depends on your desires and where you heart is.

In NYC, the starting salary for teachers is around 46k. And

usually they are walking towards their cars at 3pm. With all the holidays

off, they are the highest paid city workers per hour.

In NYC, the starting salary for teachers is around 46k. And

usually they are walking towards their cars at 3pm. With all the holidays

off, they are the highest paid city workers per hour.

They may be walking to their cars, but most have work that they are taking home. When I was in nursing school I had clinicals in an ICU. There was a former teacher (middle school) who had left because he got tired of all the work after the school day ended. He said when he was done with his shift in the hospital, he was done with his shift. He also felt there were so many people that were under the impression that they could do his job simply because they had kids!

yet with nursing you are exposed to bodily fluids that could potentially kill you. Now teachers don't have that, do they? :D There's a reason nurses are paid more money. Life and death.

Oh good grief! Methinks you overstate the danger. The incidence of nurses dying from exposure to "deadly bodily fluids" is oh I would say-- close to nil.

I just don't get it. Why the jealousy of teachers? Teaching is hard, and yes, there are bad ones out there (there are bad nurses too, of course.) I would hardly say the profession is overpaid. If we feel the need to beat up on a profession, why don't we go with some of the CEOs of these financial firms that got a taxpayer bailout?

Specializes in Med-Surg, Trauma, Ortho, Neuro, Cardiac.

Teachers around her make a nice middle income. As do Nurses.

I don't think the teachers around her got a raise this last year. They have to negotiate everything they get, some years they get more than others.

I know several teachers and I've yet to meet one that didn't retire in their 50's or early 60's, but mostly in their 50's. They get into a teaching system usually fresh out of college in their early 20's and by their 50's after putting in 30 years they have a pension.

I'll never get a pension check, and my 401K is being wiped away daily with the stock market problems. Still it's not fair to wear the martyr hat "I save lifes and am exposed to potentially dangerous things every day and all teachers do is stand around and teach and have tons of time off."

Not to mention, teachers are interacting all day with kids. Do you feel tired after 7+ hours of intense interaction with your kids? Not just being around them, but actually constantly engaging and interacting with them. That's what they do all day, every day.

My dh is a teacher. He's been there for 11 years, has three undergrad degrees (teaches two languages), has his masters, is head of his department, and makes 42K. He started at 26K. When I graduated from LPN school, I immediately made more than he did, and now that I'm an RN, that trend continues.

Yes, my dh has every weekend off. Yes, he has two months in the summer off. He spends approximately 10 hours a week outside of the classroom doing grading and prep. He spends about 10 hours a week in the summer, prepping for the new year. This is because he is good at what he does and has experience. The first couple of years of teaching, he put in 16+ hour days between teaching, grading and prep. Every weekend he spent at least 10 hours grading and prepping.

After a few years, you built up a bank of activities that work. You streamline your grading process, you figure out what works and what doesn't work with your students. In his case, he has several novels and movies worked up now, so that every summer he only works up 1-2 new books and maybe 1-2 new movies, instead of 6-8 new books and 4-5 new movies. He has created more work for himself, because he doesn't feel the textbooks are very conducive to learning, so he creates all his own materials. However, his students routine take all the top stops in AP testing for the state, and they also routine quiz out of 4 semesters for foreign language in college. So for him, it's worth it.

He works very hard and care a lot about what he does. Teachers in general, (like nurses), do their job not only for the paycheck, but also because they truly enjoy teaching.

And as far as dangerous goes, well, yeah, I get exposed to more yuck. But it's not all roses for teachers, either. Dh teaches high school. In his classroom over the past 11 years, he's had a girl vomit and then faint, striking her head on the desk and bleeding all over the place; he's contracted whooping cough (and gave it to the rest of our family except me) from a student; he's had a kid's PEG tube come unclamped in class when the kid coughed; he's had one kid tell him after class that he was going to commit suicide and then had to physically restrain him from leaving and deal with all that; and probably because he's a guy, 6'2", in good shape, and well respected by the students, he's often the go-to guy to break up fights. He's physically placed himself in between kids who were actively throwing punches at one another. In the last round, he ended up having to get the hepatitis B series, because both the kids were seriously bleeding all over the place, and one of them was flailing around with his keys and jabbed my husband in the arm. All three of them were bleeding, it was a mess.

Why does it always have to be us against them? Why do we begrudge people who earn a decent wage and get adequate time off for honest, hard work? How many times have you heard "Must be nice to work just three days a week!" and thought to yourself--buddy, you have no idea. I deserve my pay, and I deserve my time off. And...that means that no one else does?

I would like to add that benefits vary wildly from district to district, state to state. My husband's district pays almost everything for individual insurance--I think my husband pays $25 a month? And he has great life insurance, for both him and me. HOWEVER--my job has MUCH better health insurance. For me to insure our entire family, with dental, is about $400/month. To insure our family with his insurance would be over $700/month, and the dental is so bad, it isn't worth it to add it on; most dentists in town don't even accept his dental plan. And, although my dh has severe lung issues and has to see a specialist, there isn't a specialist within 100 miles of here that is covered by his health care plan--luckily, since he's covered by mine as well, he can see one of the three local pulmonologists.

I get some tuition reimbursement, and my facility offers enough *paid* training and updates that I don't ever have to pay for CEUs. He has no tuition reimbursement, and he has to get all his updates on his own time. He doesn't get paid to do them, and he doesn't get any reimbursement. I clock in to do my CEUs.

Yes, his retirement is good; but actually, I think mine is better. I think that is an anomaly, though; our hospital has a great retirement program. One thing I am jealous of--his union represents him. If he gets taken to court over anything--his union covers his legal costs, beyond what the school district does. I have to have my own , because I am not depending upon my facility to represent me if I am ever named in a lawsuit.

Every word you wrote hit home with me. The only difference is that I was an elementary school teacher. I am working on my RN right now but I make more as an LPN and I am less stressed out than I ever was as a teacher.

P.S I think it's outrageous that nurse's are talking about how easy teachers have it compared to them but if a non-nurse said: I can't believe they get paid all of that money for just having a 2 year degree to fluff pillows and pass pills we would be up in arms over here.

Everything looks easy when you are on the outside looking in. For those who think teachers have it so easy why don't you go back to school and try it?

I am a former high school English teacher. I worked in that capacity for three years, and the highest I ever grossed was just over $40k. Yes, I had 2 months off every summer, and 1-2 week breaks for holidays, but I routinely worked 60-hour weeks (for which I did not receive overtime). The job always follows a teacher home, because there are lessons to be prepared for the next day, papers to grade, etc. And no matter how long you stay at school, there is never enough time to get it all "done." Additionally, the atmosphere at most high schools is simply appalling, with teachers being at the low end of the totem pole in terms of respect, autonomy, and support. Not that nursing always scores an A+ on those points either, but at least I will get paid for each hour that I have to endure those conditions, and when I leave work, I'm not bringing a stack of grading home with me.

Incidentally, after I finish with LVN school in May, I will earn approximately the same amount of $$ with a one-year vocational certificate that I ever did with my four-year English lit degree. Go figure.

Just another former teacher here chiming in to say that teaching is not as easy as it looks from the outside.

I taught high school Spanish for two years. One year in an inner city school and the next at a suburban high school. Yes- I left my classroom at 3:15, but with a bag full of papers to grade, lessons to prepare for the next week and a list of parents I needed to call or e-mail. I also came in every day at 6:30 am (an hour before school started) to get my classroom ready, make copies and complete some of the mountains of paperwork that teachers are required to fill out. I spent my unpaid lunch period and my prep period tutoring struggling students, proctoring make up exams and trying to keep the students placed in my room for study hall on task.

At the inner city school I had to deal with threats (from the students and their parents) and the neighborhood violence that spilled into the school from the streets.

At both schools I had to buy my own classroom "decorations" (ie verb charts and object labels in Spanish) chalk, pens, overhead markers and copy paper.

All in all I probably put in sixty hours plus a week for $32,000 a year. So even if you assume that I only put in 7.5 hours a day for my 186 contract days I only made 22/hr, which is slightly lower than a new grad nurse with an ADN in this area.

If you base it on the hours I actually put in I made a little over $14 an hour!

I find it very sad that some of the posters on here are so disrespectful toward teachers and truly think that most of them sit around and do nothing for great pay. Its not okay for me to assume that a nurse sitting at a computer in the nurses station is surfing the internet so why is it okay for you to assume that the teacher leaving at 3:00 pm has the rest of the day to do what they choose?

+ Add a Comment