Insane School District Asks Parents To Rent Out Rooms To Its Teachers To Deal With Housing Crisis

One school district out of the San Francisco Bay area has reached out to ask its students’ parents to offer housing to its teachers due to California’s affordable housing crisis across the state, as reported by a local media outlet.

The report comes to light in the wake of seven teachers quitting their positions at the end of the previous academic year in June, forcing officials within the Milpitas Unified School District to reach out to the parents of its students last week requesting that they fill out a form on their website. The form in question is a questionnaire that asks if they “have a room for rent at your home and would like to share the housing opportunity with our . . . educators,” as stated by The Washington Post.

This survey also questioned the parents about the possibility of sharing the number of rooms available in their houses and just how much they would charge to rent out the rooms.

Officials with the district stated that they ended up getting a few dozen responses to the form over the course of a few days.

“With 53 responses to our call for Rooms for Rent for [district staff] in such a short time, this is evidence that our entire [team], which includes our teachers and classified support staff, is valued by our Milpitas community members, parents, and caregivers,” expressed Superintendent Cheryl Jordan in a statement sent out to The Post.

A new resolution which was unanimously approved by members of the Milpitas school board claimed, during a meeting that took place last month, that the gap between those who can afford a house in the Bay Area and those who are not able to is “widening at an alarming rate.”

The district in question sports roughly 1,000 employees, about half of which work in the district as teachers, that are labeled as “moderate-income employees” and are reportedly struggling to buy or rent residences within a radius of 15 miles of the district’s jurisdiction.

A report from Glassdoor stated that the average salary of a teacher in Milipitas its roughly $66,000 a year.

Another report, this time from the Economic Policy Institute, stated that between 2014-2019 the educators of California earned roughly 15.5% less than those outside of the job who are also college-educated to a similar level, making it quite difficult to survive in the insane economy of California.

As of writing, California sports the 4th highest average rent in the country out of 56 states and territories, as reported by rentdata.org, which claims that Fair Market Rent for the state of California is a whopping $2,274 for a 1-bedroom apartment out in the Oakland-Fremont area.

Falling within the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara county area, the City of Milpitas sports “very high” rents in comparison to the national average, expressed the website, going further to add that the area is far more expensive than about 99% of other Fair Market Rent areas.

A two-bedroom apartment in the county averages out to almost $3,000 per month.

“We’ve lost out on some employees that we tried to recruit because once they see how much it costs to live here, they determine that it’s just not possible,” stated Jordan to NBC News.

Despite all of these concerns, the district has once again not chosen to raise the salaries of its employees. Officials with the district threw the blame of the recent resignations onto various economic factors such as an increase of over 25% in the interest rates that have spiked the price of building new homes.

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