Housing Costs Pushing Teachers Far From School

Anne Arundel school Superintendent Eric J. Smith announced last month that the system would begin an analysis of what it would take to make the county's salary structure competitive with the rest of the region. Salary disparities complicate the effort to recruit and retain good teachers; the county is losing 800 of its 5,600 teachers this year because of resignations and retirements.

Melchor-Heinlen was renting a two-bedroom apartment in Catonsville, a Baltimore suburb, but she wanted a house with a yard for Ezra, her 3-year-old son, whose custody she shares with her ex-husband. Nothing in Catonsville fit her budget. "There's three houses for sale on the street I lived on," she said. "I couldn't afford them [now]. I could afford them before."

She looked for months and finally settled on a house in the Westgate neighborhood of Baltimore. It was a house nearing foreclosure, a rat trap, a dump, a dwelling cloaked in "seven years of filth, roaches, bedbugs, mice, and a healthy rat population outside," Melchor-Heinlen recalled.

Even that house cost $180,000, which was $20,000 over the top of her price range. She'll eventually look for a roommate.

"I could not afford a house on my own," she said. "I could only afford one with my parents putting in a hefty chunk of change into it, which is mildly embarrassing when you are in your thirties."

Her parents, both retired educators, came from Dundee, Mich., late last month to help Melchor-Heinlen move in. Together, they wiped mouse droppings from the kitchen shelves, scraped layers of grease from the floor, painted over graffiti spray-painted on the basement walls and repainted the interior of the 1930s Dutch Colonial.

"When I first walked in, it was . . . dismaying, I guess," said Dorothy Heinlen, Eli's mother.

Melchor-Heinlen's original plan was to share the house with Jennifer Fenimore, the music teacher at Crofton Woods. Fenimore eventually decided she wanted to find her own home.

Fenimore, 30, is a fourth-year teacher with a bachelor's degree. She earns $36,584, considerably less than Melchor-Heinlen.

She is moving out of her one-bedroom Annapolis apartment this month because the rent, $998 a month, is going up $30.

"It's that tight," she said.

Fenimore also wants to buy a house, but she can afford even less home than Melchor-Heinlen. She wants a monthly mortgage payment that is no higher than $900.