What Jobs In Education Are There Besides Being A Classroom Teacher?
Last Saturday, my 17-year-old niece Lila slouched at my kitchen table, chocolate chip cookie crumbs sticking to the sleeve of her soccer hoodie, and stared at her college planning worksheet. She volunteers three afternoons a week at our town’s rec center after-school program, comes home every week talking about the second graders that follow her around like ducklings, but she’d just crossed out “education major” on her list of possible degrees. “I love kids,” she said, “but I don’t want to be a teacher. I don’t know what else I can do, I guess.”
I laughed, because I’ve spent the last 12 years volunteering on our local PTA, and I’ve been inside enough public schools to know that classrooms are only a tiny part of what makes education work. Every day, dozens of people who aren’t classroom teachers show up to support kids, and most people barely notice their work. I started walking Lila through the people I know, to show her how many options there actually are.
First I told her about Javi, the youth enrichment coordinator at our neighborhood elementary. I see him every morning when I drop off my third grader, leaning against the playground fence, high-fiving kids as they run in, remembering that one’s allergic to bee stings and that another just got a new puppy. He plans all the after-school clubs, from robotics to sewing, organizes the fall festival and the end-of-year picnic, and mediates more four-square disputes than I can count. He got his degree in recreation, and told me once he always knew he didn’t want to stand in front of a class teaching math or reading. He just wanted to be the person that makes school feel like a safe, fun place for kids who don’t always fit the traditional classroom mold.
Next up was my neighbor Sarah, a speech language pathologist at the local middle school. She works with 15 to 20 kids a week, mostly one on one or in small groups, helping with everything from articulation issues to stuttering to helping kids on the autism spectrum learn social communication. She went into education because her little brother had severe speech delay as a kid, and she wanted to help other families like hers. She never wanted to manage 25 kids a day, handle parent-teacher conferences for every student, or spend nights grading, so this role fit exactly what she wanted. She gets to build really deep relationships with her kids, and leaves work at work most days.
Then there’s Jen, my college roommate who’s a K-8 school librarian. A lot of people assume she’s a teacher, but her job doesn’t require writing report cards or lesson plans for whole classes. Most days she’s helping kids find books that match their weird, specific obsessions—last month she told me she spent a whole afternoon tracking down 12 different books about construction vehicles for a first grader who refused to read anything else. She teaches older kids how to tell if an online source is real, helps teachers pull materials for their history units, and runs the summer reading program. She says the best part of her job is that she gets to meet every kid in the building, and she never has to send a kid to the office for talking too much.
I also mentioned my cousin Emma, who used to be a fourth grade teacher, quit after five years because she hated all the mandatory testing documentation and constant classroom management that came with the job. Now she works for a non-profit that creates free hands-on STEM lessons for low-income elementary schools. She spends her days testing out volcano projects and beginner coding activities, adjusting lessons to work for kids with different learning needs, and visits schools once a month to see how her lessons work in action. She works 9 to 5, takes all her weekends off, and still gets to impact how kids learn every day. Other roles I’ve seen that fit the list: school nurses, occupational therapists, special education aides, district testing coordinators, and even the folks who run school mental health programs that don’t require leading a class.
What I told Lila is that a lot of people default to “if you love kids, be a teacher” because that’s the role everyone sees. But schools can’t run without all these other people, and the pay and benefits are often just as good as classroom teaching, with different workloads that fit different lifestyles. For parents who have a teen in this spot, the best first step isn’t to push them to change their mind about teaching. It’s to help them look around: next time you’re at your kid’s school, point out the different roles you see. Pull up your local district job board to read the actual job descriptions for open roles, most are posted publicly. Most local professionals are happy to do a 15 minute phone call or a half-day shadow to let a teen see what the job is really like, no strings attached.
After we talked, I connected Lila with Javi, and she shadowed him for a day last month. She got to help set up the fall craft station, help break up a fight over who got to go down the slide first, and pass out apples and granola bars to kids staying after school. She texted me that night saying it didn’t feel like “work” the way she always imagined work would be. She’s still thinking about it; she’s also looking into school nursing, so she might end up going in a totally different direction.
The thing that sticks with me is how many kids and young adults write off working in education entirely just because they don’t want to be a classroom teacher. There’s room for everyone here—people who love organizing events, people who love books, people who love solving communication problems, people who just want to hang out with kids outside of lesson plans. It doesn’t all have to fit one narrow box. Right now, Lila’s just happy to have more options than just crossing out “education” on her worksheet.
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