Why St. Hope Public Schools lost 70% of its teaching staff in one year
St. Hope Public Schools has a teacher problem.
Of the 54 teachers employed at St. Hope schools in November 2024, only 16 remain in their roles one year later (another three came back as administrators). An additional five hired in 2025 were gone before Thanksgiving break.
Several of these teachers not only left St. Hope, but the teaching profession.
St. Hope leaders, under scrutiny from their charter authorizer, Sacramento City Unified School District, are highlighting more optimistic statistics. According to documents obtained by The Sacramento Bee, school officials calculated their teacher retention rate to be 85%.
Their calculation does not include teachers who left during the 2024-25 school year, employees who were ineligible to return because of a credentialing or performance issue, or employees who were promoted to other roles within the school.
Of 47 teachers employed on the last day of school in June, seven were not eligible to return due to a lack of permit or credential and three did not have their contracts renewed. Eight teachers who were eligible to return did not and three came back as administrators. Ultimately, 26 teachers, or 55% of the charter school’s elementary, middle and high school teachers, returned to their classrooms in the fall.
Both the elementary/middle school (Public School 7) and Sacramento Charter High School are hemorrhaging teachers even though the charter school promised its charter authorizer that it would to recruit and retain credentialed teachers as one of many corrective actions needed to satisfy the terms of its charter renewal.
In a brief statement, district charter oversight administrator Amanda Goldman said that the current teacher retention and credential rates are “objectively low” and “concerning.”
For comparison, SCUSD has seen an average of about 8% of teachers leaving or taking on nonteaching roles in the district in the past three years, according to district spokesperson Al Goldberg.
Vanessa Cudabac, former St. Hope teacher and now Sacramento City Teachers Association representative for the school, said that this turnover was typical of the school.
“The model of St. Hope, unfortunately, is one of a constant turnstile of teachers and great instability,” she said. “Since it is very difficult for them to attract experienced, credentialed teachers they typically hire untrained, non-credentialed teachers with little experience. Perhaps it is their preference as non-experienced teachers ask less questions. They then provide those teachers with very little support and place them in substandard working conditions.”
St. Hope Superintendent Elisha Ferguson Parsons did not respond to questions surrounding the loss of 70% of their teachers in one year, restating the school’s stat of 85% of eligible teachers returning to their positions.
In response to a district inquiry about the high turnover rate obtained by The Bee, St. Hope leaders said that they were looking at their interview process to determine if candidates are “really ready to engage in continuous feedback” and get a better understanding of how people do on campus before offering them the job.
Chaos in the classroom
Sac High teacher and union site lead Tayah Kirschenmann said that most teachers have left due to poor or even unsafe working conditions and a lack of support from St. Hope administrators.
Students at St. Hope schools are high needs, she said. Almost three-quarters of Sac High students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, which is associated with increased behavioral challenges in the classroom. Kirschenmann is seeking more mental health support for students, special ed aides, education specialists and classroom supplies to help improve classroom conditions.
“At the beginning of the year we had quite a few teachers who have been harassed or threatened by students, and when these concerns are brought to admin, nothing is done,” she said. “Any concerns that get brought up by teachers, like student behavior, lack of support, lack of resources — instead of finding solutions for those concerns, we are told we’re not a good fit for the school. We are told to quit.”
When Jen Budmark, a teacher of 25 years, was hired as a middle school math teacher at PS7 in July, she was ecstatic. She had never been more excited about a job in her life — she wholeheartedly believed in St. Hope’s stated mission of serving underprivileged kids, she said. But her vision of the school was shattered soon after students returned in the fall.
“It was like war,” she said. “Worse than I’d ever experienced in 25 years of teaching.”
Budmark’s classroom was unmanageable due to a lack of rule enforcement on administration’s part, she said. In less than a month of teaching at PS7, she had to break up fights and received daily verbal threats from students.
A lack of classroom aides and processes for addressing poor student behavior exacerbates the issue, Kirschenmann said.
In response to a question about teacher safety at St. Hope schools, Parsons replied in an email “St. HOPE Public Schools takes great pride in its commitment to student and staff safety.”
Former PE teacher Shad Selby said that he didn’t have trouble with his own students, but regularly observed students acting out in classes taught by long-term substitute teachers, who are given worksheets to teach from in lieu of curriculum. When he returned to his classroom after an absence that left his class in the hands of a substitute, his room would be “destroyed,” he said.
“It’s the wild west,” Selby said.
Budmark wanted to stick it out because she loved the majority of the students and the other teachers she worked with, but ultimately quit immediately after a parent confronted her in her classroom about an email she sent to him about his child, she said.
“I don’t know if I ever worked anywhere where the rules mattered for nothing,” she said. “I want some basic expectation from the school that if students don’t behave and follow the rules there will be repercussions.”
Ultimately Budmark left the profession completely. Despite being happy at her new retail job which pays one-third as much, she said she is still traumatized by her experience at Sac High.
‘It’s a hard job’
Teacher Ed Boretz, who has taught graphic design at Sac High for two years, said that he faced similar hardship in his first year at the school and had thought about quitting early on. He’s glad he didn’t.
After coming from teaching at a private college in San Diego, he knew he had to adjust his approach for this student group composed of students from low-income households many of whom lack positive adult role models.
“I knew I could adjust, but it took a lot of learning on my part and learning the procedures, adjusting behavior,” he said. “Can’t raise your voice, you’ve got to be cool-headed. Severe discipline, all on the part of the teacher. And I think it paid off. I learned a lot my first year, and now behavior in my classroom is not an issue.”
Despite the challenges Boretz faced, he said he felt supported by school administrators. He credits his mentor, Sac High principal Christina Williams James, for helping him learn the skills to manage his classroom and connect with his students.
At a St. Hope board meeting Thursday night, Boretz shared some of the design work and art his students created in his class using Adobe InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. The pages were full of colorful magazine layouts honoring the likes of Lebron James and Beyonce, and banner mockups designed to fly on Oak Park street posts.
“Even among those hardships, you still see some really brilliant people who rise above you,” he said. “That’s what keeps me going.”
Tamra Doty, who taught science at Sac High for several years before becoming an academic coordinator, attributed the turnover to something simple: it’s a hard job.
“It’s hard, you have to really want to be here,” Doty said. “It’s a hard job.”
Doty and Boretz both said that the turnover affects the kids more than anyone. When they don’t believe the person teaching their class is going to come back the next year or even the next month, they aren’t as inclined to trust them. Each teacher described how it wasn’t until a year or two later when engaging the same students in a new class that they really saw that trust develop.
“They’re the front line of that turnover,” Boretz said. “I think there’s an assumption on their part that you’re not gonna last when you’re new, so I was happy to prove them wrong.”
Limited access to books, supplies persist
St. Hope teachers continue to report poor access to curriculum, lesson plans, classroom supplies and even books.
In her first year teaching at Sac High, Kirschenmann said she wanted to teach a full novel in her freshman English class. She managed to get a classroom set of “Romeo and Juliet,” but it was not enough for all of her students to be able to access the play from home.
English teachers are also expected to maintain a classroom selection of books that students can access given the lack of an actual school library, she said, echoing the statements of past Sac High teachers who allege they had to bring books from home to stock their classrooms.
The Bee previously reported that the campus space St. Hope refers to as a library does not function as a library, but as a “multi-use space used to hold assemblies, professional development, staff meetings, and family events such as orientation.” Former and current teachers say that kids are not able to check out books from the library.
Boretz also lamented the lack of books. When coming to Sac High to teach graphic design, he was elated to get expensive Adobe licenses for his students, but does not understand why he can’t get a textbook for them to reference.
“It would be nice to be able to assign them reading other than the stuff that I put together and print out,” he said.
Poor access to learning materials runs even deeper. When Selby was hired to teach PE in March on a provisional intern permit, he said he was shocked to find out that his class only got three days outside a week and that he must teach two of his PE classes from within a classroom. What was he directed to teach them for those 136 minutes per week? The rules of the sports the students would play outside, he said.
Selby said there was “zero material, zero direction.” He ended up drawing from his personal interest in physiology, nutrition and social-emotional learning to fill out instructional time, but coming up with the curriculum on his own was stressful, he said.
“Thank God for ChatGPT,” he said.
Materials provided for the three days of outdoor class were not much more plentiful. Selby said he had to bring his own footballs, flags and pinnies to play flag football, and a pump from home to inflate old, saggy volleyballs.
While employed at St. Hope, Selby made a number of complaints to the administration, alleging inequitable access to facilities between the boys and the girls, unsafe field conditions and concerns about a staff member’s comments to female athletes.
As of October, Selby no longer worked at Sac High; he resigned because of a credential issue.
Despite conditions she describes as poor, Kirschenmann said that she is driven to stay to help support what she said is a talented teaching staff and because she cares about the students.
“I initially applied for this job because I saw St. Hope’s mission, and I can wholeheartedly get behind their mission to have a school to help underprivileged kids get to college,” she said.
What happens next?
Why is teacher turnover a big deal? It negatively affects student achievement and is quite expensive for school districts, research shows. According to the University of Massachusetts Global, teacher turnover results in a large number of inexperienced teachers being placed in classrooms, meaning more money is put toward recruiting, hiring and training. It can also impact the school culture, with higher rates of student disciplinary actions like suspensions.
This is why SCUSD is paying closer attention to teacher retention and credentialing at St. Hope.
A Bee investigation published in June showed that St. Hope misled the district on how many teachers reported concerns about a football coach allegedly partying with students. These revelations brought new scrutiny to the school’s operations, when the school and the district were expected to sign a memorandum of understanding that would further define a corrective action plan and dictate their relationship over the next five years. The school began work on this plan in August 2024 in response to a district audit that alleged a range of major violations, including conflicts of interests among its top officers, improper use of public funding, deficient accounting processes and the employment of a largely under-credentialed teaching staff.
The effort to attract and retain credentialed teachers was a key piece of the district’s direction to St. Hope established early in the charter renewal process.
“Students deserve to have a high quality professional as their teacher in their classroom,” Trustee Tara Jeane said at an Aug. 8, 2024 charter renewal hearing. “And those professionals deserve support and the resources, the mentors, the experiences to be successful educators for those students.”
St. Hope and SCUSD are in the last stages of finalizing the MOU, which was delayed this summer when the St. Hope board refused certain terms of the district’s draft, namely the terms defining its fiscal relationship with its related nonprofit and its contract with a controversial attorney.
The St. Hope board voted Thursday night to approve what parties hope to be the final draft of the MOU. SCUSD trustees will vote on the agreement at its next board meeting on Dec. 18.
This story was originally published December 12, 2025 at 8:00 AM.
