Hey everyone, I'm an assistant middle school director, I have been teaching for 9 years and been fairly successful. I am leaving my current school and Im nervous about not being able to find another job in my area. Do any of you have any experience in going from teacher to private? I know you can make really good money from it, but I just don't know how any of that works. Im trying to keep my options open for the future. thanks so much in advance!
I mean, maybe. If you teach before school lessons and work from 6:30am-8pm five days per week and amass a studio of 80 kids you can make about what a 5A/6A head band director typically makes. If you dig into Saturday/Sunday and up that kid total to 100, you can indeed surpass them.
How do I figure? Consider this. Let's say you teach 50 kids per week at $30/lesson. That's $1500/week assuming they all show up. So you might be thinking "Great! So for 52 weeks that's $78,000/yr! Pretty good setup!".
...No. In my experience a typical dedicated responsible student who shows up to all of their lessons will attend lessons for roughly 30 weeks in a 52 week schoolyear. Because you won't teach them during holiday weeks, kids get sick, kids have concerts, kids have STAAR, kids are dumb and will try to bail on you, their parents will pull them out because they want to do something else like baseball or track, parents drag their feet in August/September getting their child signed up, half your seniors will drop out after all-region, the other half will drop out after solo&ensemble. Half of your studio will drop out for summer, and the other half will only show up to *some* of their summer lessons since they're at camps/vacation the rest of the time.
I have 50 kids signed up in my current studio lineup at roughly $27-28/lesson. I probably make $45k/yr. When budgeting I calculate my $1,350/week income not on a "4 weeks per month" setup, but rather 3.2. 3.2 seems to be the magic number I've worked out. I do have more downtime/free time than a typical band director though.
This - and there are a couple of other things to consider.
Will your private lesson money pay into retirement? Will it cover insurance?
If you have to save for retirement, let's say a modest $6k a year, plus insurance (not sure what the rate would be, if you're only making $45k)... and you have to pay taxes, too? Right?
So for the person who responded saying they make $45k a year - how do you handle those other areas of budget concerns? What do you truly make in a year without those expenses?
To the OP, I'd look into other options on top of just private lesson teaching if you can't find another job teaching band.
You need to start ASAP reaching out to band directors and getting set up. Most will want you to start teaching, or at least recruiting, over the summer. The paperwork process can be a lot with background checks and vendor approvals.
