Benjamin Justman is in the middle of teaching his third semester of classes at
Central High School. Currently he is teaching sophomores and seniors in English 3-4,
and English 7-8. After just one semester of student teaching last school year Justman was immediately offered a permanent position as an English teacher. Which he happily accepted and now hopes to continue working as a Central teacher for years to come.
This was not Justman’s life goal coming out of high school. Going to University of
Wisconsin he knew he wanted to be an English major, but teaching was not on the cards. He dropped out of UW after two years not knowing what he wanted to do.
“I took some time off, and then that time off turned into ten years” Justman joked about his “gap decade” away from college. During his time off he said he and a friend hitchhiked all across America for the first two years, picking up odd jobs and seasonal labor, before eventually he found his way to Omaha, where he settled into a five-year job in the restaurant business.
The restaurant business was not the life for him. “I thought about something that I could actually care about or find interest in and something that would challenge me and continue to help me grow and evolve a little bit… and being able to try and connect with community and be a part of the community, not just go to work and be disconnected from everyone.” So he went back to college, something he found much harder to do now that he had his adult life well established in Omaha.
Justman knew having a job as an English teacher would combine a lot of his hobbies such as reading or writing with his interest in working with younger people. He said he found working with younger people more interesting than working with other adults at mundane jobs.
After completing two more years of college, he was able to be a student teacher at Central. Omaha Public Schools was the best choice since they were the only district paying their student teachers.
Justman remarked that becoming a teacher is very challenging because they expect you to work a semester completely unpaid right out of college before they even consider hiring you. He’s very happy he was picked up by Central right away.
Justman said he doesn’t think much about there being “teacher shortages” at the
moment. The biggest effect it has on him is his very large class sizes: upwards of 35
students in one period. He finds it hard to connect to students personally and to teach to ways that benefit certain students when he has so many at once. He also noticed that despite it being slightly easier to find a job opening in the shortage that did not
becoming a teacher any easier.
Coming from a steady income of five years then going into college being paid almost nothing and then interning as a student teacher was a challenge.
The teacher salary of course is not much either once he did get his official job. First year teachers with a bachelor’s degree make $45,000 a year for the 2023-24 school year, according to the master agreement between OPS and the teacher’s union. Most student teachers do not get paid anything at all, OPS only recently started doing so to try and get more teachers wanting to work in their district.
Even though there is a shortage, including at Central who currently have their
lowest number of unfilled positions they have ever had. Justman said that many people he talks to are trying to become teachers and they haven’t been able to find schools who will take them, Justman believes this is a fault of the system. “I think the process is a little convoluted at times and it’s slow, there’s no perfect answer but there’s some sort of miscommunication down the line making it difficult. The jobs are there, they just aren’t getting filled,” said Justman.
