This story is a collaboration between LAist and Open Campus. 

Shayna Meikle owns Pigeon’s Roller Rink in Long Beach, along with a nearby skate shop and another rink in Mission Viejo. She spends most days in front of a computer, tending to the minutiae of running a business, or updating her company’s social media.

But, a few times a week, Meikle throws on a pair of skates and teaches clients the basics.

“Bend your knees!” she instructs them. “And stick your butt out!”

Shayna Meikle takes a spin with Elliott Fromm, general manager of her skating rink in Long Beach.

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“Arms in front of you,” she adds, as she extends her own.

About a decade ago, Meikle’s life looked different. As part of a teacher-training program, she taught science to middle schoolers.

But the money Meikle earned wasn’t enough to cover her living expenses. To make ends meet, she had to work after work.

During the week, Meikle was at her assigned campus in the city of Bell by 7 a.m. At 3:30 p.m., she’d clock out and race down to Carson for her college classes. From 7 to 10 p.m., she did roller skating gigs across the South Bay, and ran her own roller derby league. Then, she’d head home to Long Beach, exhausted. On weekends she was either at games, or studying and lesson planning.

Her schedule was intense, but she enjoyed the work. “I love science, and I love[d] the students,” she said. “I could have done that my whole life.”

But halfway through the four-year program, Meikle quit to focus on skating full-time.

Listen • 39:38

Listen • 39:38

The cost of becoming a teacher in California. Who can afford to do it?

Across the U.S., states are constantly in the midst of teacher shortages. California's teaching prep and residency programs are supposed to be part of the solution. But many hopeful teachers struggle to balance their passion with the risk of debt and high cost of living.

Meikle doesn't regret it. But in the context of ongoing teacher shortages in California, that choice speaks to a broader failure to create conditions that entice educators to enter, or stay in, the field — conditions that are further complicated in Southern California by the cost of living and getting around.

In 2022, half as many people graduated from California's teacher-prep programs as in 2004, the peak year, according to the Learning Policy Institute.

“I think most people don't understand what it takes to become a teacher, the hoops you have to jump through,” said Jarod Kawasaki, department chair of teacher education at Cal State Dominguez Hills.

On top of proving subject matter competence and passing a string of required testing, K-12 teacher candidates in California must complete at least 600 hours of time working in a classroom — more than many other states in the country. Often, that labor is unpaid.

But to cultivate a reliable and diverse teacher workforce, experts don’t recommend scaling back on those requirements. Instead, they call on policymakers and stakeholders to design programs that help prospective educators meet them without self-sacrifice.

Staying in the classroom meant saying no

Meikle graduated shortly after the Great Recession. And when the jobs she’d had her eye on evaporated, she had to pivot.

A teacher-prep program at Cal State Dominguez Hills promised to let her put her degrees in geology and ecology and evolutionary biology to good use. In exchange for a four-year commitment to teach science, the program would cover the cost of her university coursework. Meikle would also earn about $19.50 an hour and receive an annual $4,000 stipend.

“For me, straight out of college, I was, like: ‘Oh my god! Nineteen dollars and fifty cents an hour? This is amazing!’” she said.

Teaching "really prepared me for where I am. I wouldn't be here without it. I learned so much. I grew so much," Meikle told LAist.

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Meikle spent the summer of 2011 learning about classroom management. Three months later, she had a classroom of her own. The program didn’t assign her a mentor teacher, she said, so she sought one out for herself. All in all, the start of her teaching career felt like being a baby bird getting pushed out of its nest, she told LAist.

Her stipend went to classroom supplies and professional clothes. The bulk of her wages went to pay off student loans. There wasn’t much left after that.

Little by little, the skating gigs got bigger. “I was getting all these opportunities, and I was getting paid well,” she said.

Meikle also started seeing she was having a positive impact on adults.

Meikle recalled meeting a mother of five who had struggled with suicidal thoughts. After six months in the roller derby league, the woman shared with Meikle that skating made her feel "more alive than ever." Meikle didn’t doubt the importance of her work after that.

With time, Meikle started getting coaching gigs around the world. But to take on those jobs, she had to leave her students with substitutes — something she didn’t like.

Meikle also began to envision a life outside the classroom, one with more flexibility and less burnout: “I have to go be a professional skater, or stay here and say no to all of these opportunities,” she thought.

Are you a student teacher in the Los Angeles area trying to balance clinical hours with paying the bills? Share your story with us.

What it takes to become a teacher

California offers multiple pathways toward completing the 600-hour requirement, including traditional teacher-prep programs and residency programs, which are modeled after medical residencies and usually provide some form of compensation.

Cathy Yun is deputy director of the Educator Preparation Laboratory, an initiative spearheaded by the nonprofit Learning Policy Institute and the Bank Street Graduate School of Education in New York City. The project has partners across the country, including UC Berkeley and UCLA. It aims to ensure that teachers enter the classroom ready to provide students with an education that fosters “deeper learning” skills, including critical thinking.

Yun has been studying teacher-prep programs since 2019. Before that, she started several residency programs at Fresno State.

Throughout the U.S, she told LAist, “fewer people are seeing teaching as a desirable or viable career choice.”

The shortages, Yun said, are especially pronounced in special education, dual-language instruction, math and science.

The 600-hour requirement is meant to give aspiring educators ample time in the classroom before they get a chance to lead one of their own, Kawasaki said. But the requirement can serve as a barrier, particularly at Cal State Dominguez Hills, where many students are either Pell Grant recipients (a federal award for students with “exceptional financial need”) or the first in their families to go to college (a trait associated with lower household income).

The semester before student teaching is often a “stopping point” for prospective educators, Kawasaki told LAist. Students will say: “I can’t quit my job, so I’m going to [take a] pause.”

Most students do come back, he said, but it can sometimes take years. In the meantime, students might save up to have money set aside while they complete their clinical hours. Others return to the program after landing coveted internships, which provide a salary.

“Is 600 hours great for learning? Absolutely,” Kawasaki said. “But [the requirement] assumes that you have the means to be able to do that without working.”

California requires more student teaching than many other states, including Arizona, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Texas.

But to attract more candidates to the profession, Kawasaki doesn’t believe it would be wise to lower California’s requirement. Spending a significant amount of time at a school, he said, allows aspiring teachers to see what it takes to help students grow. It also enables them to become part of the school community.

Middle school students walk around Young Oak Kim Academy in Koreatown.

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A teacher who stayed

Kevin Gutierrez is a middle school science teacher at Young Oak Kim Academy in Koreatown. He’s been at the school for eight years, including the time he spent student teaching.

Like Meikle, Gutierrez signed up for a teacher-prep program that fast-tracked him into the classroom. In 2016, immediately after earning a bachelor’s degree in public health at UC Irvine, he enrolled at UCLA. There, he worked toward a master’s degree in education and a preliminary credential in biology and general science. The program paid for most of his tuition — but Gutierrez still had to figure out how to pay for his living expenses.

During the week, Gutierrez used public transportation to move between Downey, where he lived; Koreatown, where he taught; and Westwood, where he studied. He paid using his UCLA TAP Card, which offered free unlimited rides. While he was in transit, he usually graded student work or caught up on sleep.

Shayna Meikle's commute as a student teacher. Not depicted: The jobs she'd take in and around the South Bay in the evening.

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Kevin Gutierrez's commute as a student teacher. The commute would be about 100 minutes without any traffic.

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After teaching all day and going to class, Gutierrez worked as an Uber driver, usually from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. He also picked up shifts on weekends.

Early on in his program, other challenges emerged. First, Gutierrez’s landlord renovated the apartment he shared with his family in Lynwood and used that as a reason to jack up the rent. Then, Gutierrez’s mentor teacher passed away.

What kept him going through this difficult time?

Gutierrez’s program paired him with another mentor, who was extremely supportive, he said. Plus, his colleagues at Young Oak Kim Academy were always checking in. They’d routinely pop by his class and ask: “Hey, do you need anything?”

Gutierrez also endured because of personal motivation. He wanted to honor his mother, who fled violence in El Salvador as a teenager and didn't get to go to high school.

Kevin Gutierrez in his classroom.

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He also thought about a child he met while volunteering as an undergraduate. The boy was in fifth grade, but he couldn’t add or subtract. Gutierrez was dismayed that the child had gotten that far in school without learning fundamental math.

He’d also noticed that there weren’t many Latinos leading classrooms. As someone who lost his father at a young age, he wanted to be a role model for others.

At UCLA, faculty learned about the challenges Gutierrez was facing and secured an additional grant to help him out. “It took so much weight off my shoulders,” he said.

Despite that grant, the tuition support and all the Uber rides, Gutierrez still had to take out a loan to get through school. “But it wasn’t huge,” he said.

Building a diverse workforce

To attract more prospective teachers — and to make the profession more accessible to candidates from historically excluded groups — experts say it’s essential to consider the cost.

Kawasaki, the department chair at Cal State Dominguez Hills, has conducted research on the cost of becoming a K-12 educator, particularly for students from working class communities of color. For some of the California students in his research, getting through their prep programs required skipping meals to save money, or going without sleep so they could work.

In his work, Kawasaki notes that even teacher-prep programs with “frameworks that define teaching and learning around disrupting historical and current oppressive policies,” largely ignore the material needs of teacher candidates of color. “I, too, am complicit,” he wrote.

A 2023 report found that, nationally, more than 60% of all full-time, public school teachers have taken out student loans to pay for their education. Among them, more than one third reported working multiple jobs because of their student debt.

"Teaching is the best way for me to give back to my community, to give back to my people, " Gutierrez told LAist.

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“If we are really serious about addressing the [teacher] shortage, and especially addressing the shortage with a diverse workforce, then there has to be something that's done in terms of alleviating the financial burden that so many of our [teacher candidates] have to take on,” Kawasaki said.

Estela Zarate, dean of Loyola Marymount University’s school of education, noted that for many first-generation college graduates, “teaching is often the entry point to a middle-class job.”

“The cost of living has increased so much, particularly in areas like Los Angeles,” she said.

Incurring a loan to pursue teaching and then not being able to buy a home because you’re in debt is not going to draw more people to the profession, she added: “The math doesn't add up.”

In a May 2025 report, Yun and her colleague identified characteristics of high-quality teacher residency programs. These include a full-year of teaching experience alongside a mentor, coupled with the gradual release of responsibilities. Compensation for carefully-selected mentors and financial support for residents, they said, is also key.

To promote retention, the report also includes recommendations for policymakers. At the federal level, Yun and her colleague suggest covering teachers’ monthly student loan payments, so long as they remain in the classroom.

To encourage more people to join the profession at the state level, California Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, a Democrat from Torrance, has introduced a bill to pay student teachers the same daily rate as substitute teachers.

The bill has advanced with bipartisan support through the Assembly and will be heard by the Senate’s education committee on June 25. But whether it’ll pass is anyone’s guess, given that California is grappling with a $16 billion decline in tax revenue.

Saying goodbye

Leaving education, Meikle told LAist, is one of the toughest choices she’s ever made. “I cried about it. I went on long hikes by myself to think about it,” she said.

Before making her decision, she asked everyone around her for guidance. Meikle even asked her students to weigh in.

She polled her nearly 300 students: “Should I, your favorite teacher, leave you to do roller skating full time?”

All but one student said yes.

The rest told Meikle: “Go, Miss. Follow your dreams.”

Illustration by Olivia Hughes.