“I never wanted to leave the classroom.”

Hannah Severson is a third-grade teacher from the Madison Metropolitan School District. After teaching for five years, she made the difficult decision in 2022 to step away from her classroom.

Brooke Curry: To start, tell us a little bit about your educational background and what led you to teaching.

Hannah Severson: I graduated from UW-Madison in 2017 with an Early Childhood and English as a Second Language degree. I was a student teacher in the Madison Metropolitan School District and that’s where I taught for 5 years. One year I taught at Allis Elementary, which is where I student taught, and then moved to Mendota Elementary on the north side of Madison.

Oh my goodness, what’s led me to teaching? I’ve always loved kids; I’ve always wanted to work with kids and teaching was a very direct path to do that.

Q: Obviously issues arose because of COVID. How did you navigate that?

A: In 2020, we went from being in-person to thinking we were just going to be out of school for a week, to then indefinitely not being in a classroom setting. So, I think that most people did the best they could. There was a disconnect of being in a district as big as Madison is – that I think has over 20 elementary schools – that it was really difficult. What worked for one school didn’t work for another. So, I think being at the school I was in with a super high poverty rate, we had to take things into our own hands.

One example that comes to mind is: We were supposed to have a set lunch hour from noon to one that everybody was supposed to take. But the truck that delivered meals to the apartment complex where a lot of our kiddos came from came at 11:30. So then we had to navigate resetting a whole schedule to meet those needs. And then same thing with a lot of kiddos not having devices or wifi. Teachers were going out and delivering hotspots, delivering devices, to try and get kiddos online for school.

So to put it cohesively, we were given a plan by district and it probably worked for certain schools. But that as a team – I was teaching second grade at this point – we came together and said, “So this isn’t going to work.” And we scrapped it to meet the needs of our kiddos.

Q: Recently, and very recently, you made the decision to step away from teaching. Can you speak a little bit to that? Maybe what led into your decision both on a professional level and then a home life level. You can talk about your son!

A: Yes! For sure. So, I returned from maternity leave at the beginning of February and all was well for about a month. I had one student that became very explosive with behaviors. He was flipping desks, flipping chairs… It was very evident that there were other things going on and this was just the form of communication that he could sort out how to use. That in and of itself was not the concern. I mean, he wasn’t the first student I’d ever had that’s done that. A big part of my walking away was the response both at a school level and at a district level.

By other professionals in the school, it was this response of not doing enough academically. “We can only do so much to deescalate this child,” and “we have to let him have his space to get upset.” But then pairing that with, “Why aren’t you teaching more?” And it just felt like there was never a right answer. And, you know, in the last how many years, standardized tests have become the end-all of whether you’re a good teacher or not. It felt like there was this pressure of looming tests where if your scores aren’t high enough, they’d ask, “What aren’t you doing?” Never a consideration of these behaviors in the classroom.

When I think about the district level, I think about what they allow to happen with behaviors like this. How accountable or not accountable families may be around it. With this specific student, his family separated what happened at school as what happened at school and that if it’s not happening at home, it’s not a responsibility we have.

So then, you know, a couple days after this incident had happened, this parent tried to reach out to me at, I think it was like 6:30 at night. I had turned off my notifications for anything school-related. And then the next day, I was approached by a higher-up staff member wondering why I was not a team with my families because I was not in contact with her. You could just do no right.

If you picture a triangle: Needing to be successful academically with your students, needing to be successful with supporting their behaviors and needing to be a team with families. You could just never do all three. It felt like maybe you got two, but something was always going to go to the wayside. There was such ridiculous expectations for all three of them, it just felt like you couldn’t meet it.

I think I just couldn’t handle it. It felt like being a martyr for so many things. A lot of times the way families spoke to us was another layer. I kind of touched on that with this one student but I’ll never forget being told in a staff meeting, “If you call a family with less than desirable news and they start swearing at you, just hang up and call them back in a little bit once they’ve had time to calm down.” It’s just very telling of being a punching bag for so many things.

I felt like it got to a point when we were supposed to support families speaking to us like that, that it felt impossible to be a team because you were just being beat down. And if you’re not being supported by families, how do you make a plan to help with behaviors? Because if a kiddo is at a point of feeling so angry that they’re flipping desks, there’s obviously things that need to be supported. And I don’t know a single teacher who doesn’t want to support that, but it gets impossible when, on the flip side, you have a family that doesn’t want to support you in it. And on the other side, you’re being asked why you’re not doing more academics.

And that’s been something I’ve struggled with for a long time, but I think what finally made me do it was having a baby at home. He’s 5 months, and I think it just got to a point where I felt like I was giving more or being expected to give more to my kids at school than I was to my kid at home. And, I think, it just got to a point where, I mean, I’m a mother to one, not 14.

When I’ve talked to people about leaving, in the same breath, it was the easiest and hardest thing I’ve ever done. It was heartbreaking because I never thought it would be this way. I never had intentions of getting a master’s or a doctorate to be a principal to go into curriculum. I never wanted to leave the classroom.

It’s one thing to have to do all of these things or be asked of all of these things and be appreciated. But I think back to one of the questions before, of pre and post-pandemic, now it feels like still no matter what I do, or what I did, it was never enough. Something was going to give, and it wasn’t going to be at home.

Q: Do you see yourself stepping back into a teaching profession in any capacity? And how do you see that happening?

A: I’m hopeful! I am and I think this fall, I’m hopeful that will be the plan in a different district. And with that comes a lot of guilt because Madison is by far the most economically, and racially diverse district around us. With that also comes our systematic racism and different stressors that a lot of families I’ve ever worked with feel that I don’t think I would face in other districts around. It would be more so I think for me, being just a teacher. As opposed to teaching and then also delivering food and dropping off Chromebooks and hotspots and different resources.

That still means that the kiddos I was working with previously in the district are still just being left. They’re still not getting what they need.

Again, it’s this misinformation about what teachers do or don’t do. Especially in districts like Madison or in specific pockets of Madison, I should say, that not only are we teaching, but we’re trying to support and provide these resources that these people and these students have every right to. But because they’ve been failed in other capacities, then we’re trying to uplift that too, simply to bring them where they need to be to learn. Because anybody, right? If your basic needs – thinking about a hierarchy of needs – if they’re not being met, you can’t learn. If you’re not getting enough sleep at night. You’re not fed. If you’re worried about where your next meal is coming from.

As a school, as a teacher, we’re really stressing to put those things forward. But then again, when we can’t do that and those needs aren’t met, it’s still all that comes down on us. And all that comes down on the report cards that are put out by schools. “Wow, look at all these failing scores they had.”

To circle back to the question, I’m hopeful to go to a surrounding district that maybe would be more of a focus on just teaching because I’m with families that are unfortunately far more privileged to have those basic needs met and coming to me in a different space.