In January 2022, a National Education Association survey found that 55 percent of educators were thinking of leaving the profession earlier than planned, nearly double the number of teachers who said the same in July 2020. It’s a sentiment shared by many teachers, at a time when adequately staffing classrooms is already a challenge: Tens of thousands of teaching positions sit vacant this school year, and multiples more are filled by “underqualified” educators. “I knew I had a lot of good, productive years still in me, but that I couldn’t do it teaching,” says Sherlock, now 62. Several months after her injury, in August 2022, she started a new job as a grants coordinator for a community mental health agency in Northern Michigan, where she lives. That was Sherlock’s last year in the classroom. I knew I had a lot of good, productive years still in me, but that I couldn’t do it teaching. I can’t do this anymore,’” Sherlock recalls about that clarifying moment and the many difficult weeks that followed, traversing school hallways and hauling around musical instruments on crutches. The teacher, then 61 years old, turned to respond and wound up on the ground.

Sherlock was walking down the school hallway, carrying her heated-up lunch back to her classroom to eat, when a student called out to her with a question.

But it wasn’t until she broke her leg last spring that she knew it was time to call it quits. The elementary music teacher was burned out and so very tired, following years of feeling increasingly overburdened and bulldozed by students and administrators alike. The breaking point for Julie Sherlock was a literal one.

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