Meet one of Horry County’s 126 new elementary school teachers

Clarissa Pittelli gets up at 5:30 a.m. and arrives at Ocean Bay Elementary School around 7 a.m., an hour before school starts.

She’s a second-year teacher, one of dozens of new elementary school teaching positions added in the Horry County School District, and one of six first-grade teachers at Ocean Bay Elementary.

“We originally had five and we had so many kids come this year that they actually opened up a whole ’nother classroom and we got a sixth teacher in first grade,” she said.

Horry County Schools has more elementary school teachers than middle school or high school teachers, according to the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention and Advancement’s 2016 Supply and Demand Survey.

While Horry County Schools lost the equivalent of 257 elementary school teachers over the last three years, it hired 383, including Pittelli, for an increase of 126. The district now has 1,322 elementary school teachers.

South Carolina school districts that completed the CERRA survey are required to list the number of teachers hired and the number of teachers who have left as well as the reasons for leaving. When filling out the survey, districts counted full-time teachers as “1” and part time teachers at “.5” or “.75” and used the totals to generate the data.

Statewide, of all first-year teachers hired for the 2015-16 school year, 28 percent did not return to the same teaching position the following year, according the the survey.

Of the 84 Horry County elementary school teachers who did not return to their same teaching position for the 2016-17 school year, only two had less than two years of experience, and 13 had between two and five years of experience.

But Pittelli doesn’t want to stop teaching. She would like a master’s degree in literacy and to become a mentor to other teachers, staying at Ocean Bay Elementary if possible.

She started school at Kean University in New Jersey before moving to South Carolina with her husband, and got her degree in early childhood education from Coastal Carolina University after being told by friends and family that teaching would be a good career fit.

“Eventually I said alright, let’s go to college for it, let’s try it,” Pittelli said. “As soon as I did my internship here at Ocean Bay Elementary School, I fell in love with it, and I knew this was definitely what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”

Although “not a morning person,” Pittelli said she looks forward to her seeing her students.

“I don’t think if I worked a different job, not with kids, I don’t know if I’d be as happy,” she said. “I have worked other jobs in the past, and being here with kids, I want to come to work every day.”

As a first-year teacher, Pittelli was assigned another teacher as a mentor and had to keep a journal of her day-to-day activities. During their first two years, new teachers are constantly evaluated by how professionally they’re dressed, their attitude, their planning habits and how they speak to co-workers.

“Last year I felt like I was a sponge,” she said. “I was just soaking it all in, and I was taking in everything that they had to offer as veteran teachers so I could learn from them. Now I’m contributing things such as homework for the week, ideas, things that I’ve found or I’ve tried in the classroom.”

The one challenge Pittelli said she’s faced has been her work-life balance.

“It’s a career and I love it and I want to aspire to be the best that I can be, so I feel like that’s why I’m constantly bringing work home, or doing extra, or ‘how can I make this better tomorrow?’” she said. “I’m much better at it this year. I’m not closing down the building with the custodians as much as I was last year as a first-year teacher, so I’m getting better at that whole ‘balancing’ thing.”

This story was originally published February 1, 2017 at 7:43 PM with the headline "Meet one of Horry County’s 126 new elementary school teachers."