Eli Melchor-Heinlen, a 34-year-old mother with a master's degree and a teaching job in a D.C. suburb, woke up one recent morning to find her body covered with bedbug bites.
The vermin came with the house, a $180,000 fixer-upper on the edge of a good neighborhood in Baltimore. It was as much house as she could afford.
Melchor-Heinlen teaches second grade at Crofton Woods Elementary School in Anne Arundel County, where starting pay is the lowest in the Washington suburbs. With her advanced degree and five years' experience, she earns $42,024. She cannot afford to rent, let alone own, in Crofton, a once-affordable suburb where the median home price soared 20 percent to $239,950 last year.
"I don't go on vacations. I don't go out to eat. I don't buy new clothes," she said. "Part of me says, okay, maybe I just expect too much out of life."
Teachers around the District and its suburbs increasingly feel priced out of the communities where they teach.
Just a few years ago, before the real estate boom swept through places like Anne Arundel, teachers, police and others in the middle class could usually afford to own homes in the cities or counties where they worked. Today, many teachers such as Melchor-Heinlen live in exile, driving home to some run-down section of Baltimore or to an ever-more-distant area. Like the hired help of earlier generations, they cannot live where they work.
Starting pay for a first-year teacher with a bachelor's degree in the Washington region ranges from a low of $34,691 in Anne Arundel to a high of $39,457 in Montgomery, according to 2004-05 salary schedules provided by the statewide teachers unions. Starting pay will reach $40,000 next year in at least three Washington area school systems: Arlington, Fairfax and Montgomery.
But salaries haven't nearly kept pace with home prices, which climbed 18 percent last year alone in the Washington region, according to a Washington Post analysis.
"It's become an incredibly expensive place to live," said Mark Glaser, president of the teachers union in Fairfax, where the median home price tops $400,000. "And my joke is, a teacher in Fairfax County has to marry at least three other teachers."
A tiny handful of teachers, chiefly in the New York region, have broken the six-figure barrier that once meant entry to the upper class. Median teacher pay in Scarsdale, "essentially the Montgomery of New York," is now $98,130, according to Carl Korn, spokesman for New York State United Teachers. But even there, class barriers remain.
"Let me put it this way," Korn said. "You can't touch a house in Scarsdale for less than a million."
The highest base salary in the Washington region is $88,108, for a Montgomery teacher with a master's degree, 60 additional course hours of training and 25 years of experience. The top base salary in Anne Arundel is $72,083.
