Do you work?
As a new teacher 35,000 is not a lot to cover a year round schedule. And as the husband of a teacher, you know that teaching does not end when school is out. There is so much prep and grading to do, in order to be effective. Teachers deserve a pay raise, if anything. Cut the salraies of superintendents. Found out ours makes almost $400,000 a year!
Actually, I haven’t been working for the last 3 years. We got married right after she had started her master’s program and I was 1 year in to my bachelor’s degree. I graduate in April. We’ll end up with the 14k student loan that she took out before we started dating, but otherwise we’ve been living on her salary of a little less than 40k. It helped that I worked before college and had some savings, but we drive 10 year-old cars and don’t do anything that costs much money.
As for the after-school hours, she rarely has to put any time outside of her 7:15-2:45 contract time. She gets about two hours each day (between her prep period and lunch) that enable her to keep up on her grading, etc. After her first year of teaching, there hasn’t been a lot of prep that she needs to do.