Delmonica Gallipeau, a 7th grade English Language Arts teacher at Quail Hollow Middle School, took a roundabout path to education. She got her teaching degree in 1992, but spent more than 20 years working in banking. In 2017, she finally decided to pursue her passion and began a career in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.
But that meant taking a cut in pay, and running a side business as a tutor to help make ends meet.
“The kids make up for it," Gallipeau said. "That’s one thing that my grandmother told me before she died, just like, find something that you love. Don’t worry about the money. It’ll worry about itself. But living — having somewhere to live — matters.”
And finding somewhere to live on a teacher’s salary in the Charlotte region hasn’t been easy. In the seven years since she’s started teaching, Gallipeau has lived in at least four different places, including, now, in an apartment with the help of a roommate. The biggest problem, she says, is qualifying. Most apartment complexes require tenants to make three times the monthly rent. Alone, Gallipeau often can’t do that.
“That’s been very challenging, as a woman with grown children, like not even being able to afford, you know, a place," she said. "I can’t go and just qualify for a two-bedroom apartment in a decent neighborhood, or really in many neighborhoods in Charlotte. I mean, I can pay for it because I don’t have an insurmountable amount of debt, but I can’t qualify.”
CMS started this school year with nearly 300 teacher vacancies — an improvement over last year, when that number was more than 500.
High housing costs are a major barrier to finding and keeping educators. The district says its own surveys found 93% of teachers identified housing affordability as a top concern, while 61% said they would consider leaving their jobs over it.
“It’s become enough of a critical factor for us that we have begun to have a dedicated strategy around this,” said Nancy Brightwell, CMS chief of Recruitment, Retention and Talent Development, in an October interview with WFAE, after the district unveiled four new townhomes for teachers on Charlotte's west side.
Last month, CMS unveiled a series of affordable housing initiatives for teachers. Those include partnering with developers to prioritize affordable rental units and townhomes for purchase for teachers, partnering with local banks to create financial pathways to home ownership and building an “educator community” on district-owned land with 100 rental units specifically for teachers.
Housing costs outpace teacher salaries
Affordable housing is getting harder to find as Charlotte continues growing amid a housing shortage. A UNC Charlotte study found rents have come down from their 2022 peak, but nearly half of all renters in the Charlotte metro area are burdened by high costs, spending almost a third or more of their income on housing.
Meanwhile, only 2% of houses sold for less than $150,000 in the Charlotte area in 2024. That's compared to 34.5% in 2014.
The Canopy Realtors Association says the average sales price of a house in the Charlotte region in October was around $492,000, up nearly 27% in just three years,
So will affordable housing initiatives help keep teachers in the profession? Ayumi Durden, a former CMS teacher who left teaching last year, is skeptical.
“I think it’s a Band-Aid," she said.
Durden started teaching in Charlotte in 2021, after moving from New York, where she was a teacher in New York City schools for seven years. Durden says she took a 50% pay cut when she moved here. They were able to afford a home largely because of her partner Alan’s job. The mortgage and the cost of daycare for their kids meant they were living paycheck to paycheck. It had her thinking about taking a second job.
“It was such a struggle because that also meant me getting a second job would take away time from my own children and just my quality of life," Durden said.
Instead, she decided to leave teaching altogether and now works in education technology. Durden fears these affordable housing initiatives will end up funneling public resources to private developers instead of focusing on the core problem — paying teachers a fair wage to make a life for themselves.
“It is about the money — but what the money itself is signifying, which is do you appreciate the amount of work that we put in? Do you value the work that we put in?”
Base teacher salary is controlled by the state. The starting pay for a North Carolina teacher with a bachelor’s degree is a 10-month salary of about $41,000 — 42nd in the country, according to the National Education Association.
Counties have the ability to supplement that pay. And CMS boasts one of the highest supplements in the state — teachers with a bachelor’s degree start at almost $49,000. For those with a master’s, it’s about $54,000. CMS officials have said they still plan to advocate for higher pay.
“It’s not an ‘OR’ conversation, and that’s what we led with," CMS Superintendent Crystal Hill told the media last month, responding to other media reports about criticisms of district housing efforts. "This is just an additional strategy of what we can do right here. We continue to advocate all the time for increased pay at the state level.”
Gallipeau empathizes with colleagues who might be frustrated about the housing initiatives. She doesn’t know if it will be enough to meet the need. Still, she sees it as a start.
“They could just choose to do nothing," Gallipeau said. "But at least they’re trying to do something.”
CMS says the 100-unit educator community is just a pilot program, and it could be replicated if successful.
