Face of Nation : Meredith Blackwood’s typical workday begins at 7:30 a.m. in a classroom full of third graders — and ends as late as 11 p.m. in a factory across town.
Blackwood, 27, is a teacher at Cayce Elementary in West Columbia, South Carolina, where she made $36,000 for the 2018-19 school year. Her husband, Chancen Blackwood, 30, a teacher in the same school district, made $35,000.
The Blackwoods live in a state that pays teachers one of the lowest starting salaries in the country.
With annual raises that have so far been small, their combined incomes don’t cover their monthly bills. So when an unusual income booster at a local drug manufacturer arose several months ago, they took it, joining hundreds of other South Carolina teachers forced into unusually long workdays just to get by.
After their school day ends, on weekends and during school breaks, the Blackwoods don red scrubs and hair nets and join the assembly line at Nephron Pharmaceuticals, which, since March, has given part-time work to more than 650 teachers.
The teachers’ responsibilities vary. Some days they check syringes for imperfections; other days they package drugs to be sent to hospitals or assemble the boxes the drugs go into. They typically work in four-hour shifts.
For the Blackwoods, it adds to an already packed day of working extra jobs at school to make ends meet.
Meredith, who this year was named Teacher of the Year at her elementary school, works at her after-school program and summer school, and Chancen coaches football in addition to being a strength and conditioning coach and teaching health and physical education classes at Brookland-Cayce High School. Over the summer, he’s also designing training programs for student-athletes in his school’s weight room.
But none of their gigs on school grounds pays them as much on an hourly basis as Nephron, where they make $21 an hour.
In interviews with almost a dozen educators who moonlight at the factory, teachers said the work doesn’t utilize their skill sets, but offers money that they couldn’t turn down. Some spoke of using the extra cash to pay down debt, make car payments or save for big trips they had always hoped to go on. Others said it gave them a chance to put money in the bank, something they were not able to do from teaching alone.
“I never would have thought in a million years that I would be wearing a hair net and rubber gloves and working in this factory,” said Heather Herndon, 56, a kindergarten teacher at Rocky Creek Elementary School in Lexington, South Carolina, who is using the extra money to start a nest egg toward her retirement.
“I’m trying to take advantage of it, but some teachers try to work so much at Nephron to augment their income that they’re exhausted and can’t really do their job. So I’m cognizant of that.”
South Carolina, like many other parts of the country, is struggling to retain its teachers, largely because state lawmakers have resisted several efforts to give them substantial raises.
Those in the profession are finding it almost impossible to make a living wage, and out of necessity, are taking on odd jobs after their school day ends, whether it’s laboring at factories, checking tickets at concert venues, or working retail jobs to bring in a little extra cash.For Meredith Blackwood, who is using her Nephron money to pay down the $15,000 she and her husband have in student loans, being a teacher is about the relationships she builds with her students, many of whom come from low-income families. She felt deeply connected to the 27 eight- and nine-year-olds in her class this year. But her salary has posed a problem.
“With what we’re making, there’s not a lot of extra money,” Blackwood said. “I love what I do. I never got in it for the money. But that was before I realized how many bills there are.”
