As schools grapple with an ongoing teacher shortage, a New York non-profit is working to address one aspect of the problem: burnout.
Burnout is reportedly one of the root causes of an ongoing national teacher shortage according to a 2025 study by the Learning Policy Institute.
The Healing Schools Project emerged from the pandemic and the organization works with school districts to provide programming to support educator wellbeing, like healing circles, retreats, and leadership training.
“The greatest tool that we have in helping communities become resilient is connection,” said Wenimo Okoya, founder and executive director of Healing Schools Project. “During the pandemic, we really lost connection, we became deeply isolated.”
What teachers gain from a healing circle, Okoya said, is a sense of psychological safety that they can bring into the classroom. About 3,000 educators have worked with the organization so far, she said.
“If people don't feel like they can take risks ... they can't bring problems of practice to the table,” she said. “The greater the psychological safety, the more likely you are to produce effective teachers where teachers are learning, sharing problems with each other, growing and using data-driven practices to improve their instruction.”
A 2016 study published in the Social Science & Medicine journal showed that students’ cortisol levels were higher in classrooms where the teacher reported burnout.
Okoya was in Rochester recently for a Teach For America statewide summit. She said this is a concern for all teachers, but teachers of color are disproportionately affected.
“They take on additional roles,” she said “So for Black male teachers, they end up, oftentimes ... taking up disciplinary roles. For Latina teachers, they end up doing interpretation for parents with no compensation.”
Teachers also are on the frontlines of an ongoing youth mental health crisis, which Okoya said takes a toll.
The goal of her work is to better support teachers, which in turn better supports students who get to experience more stability in school from lower turnover rates, she said.
It doesn’t take a massive budget line to shift a school culture toward favoring teacher and student well-being, she said, but it is something she feels that schools urgently need to put in place.
“There are tiny ways in which every school can begin to make changes so that ... we are incorporating moments of care into the day,” she said. “So that can look like a check-in with a teacher. It can look like a circle during a staff meeting. It can look like a leader really asking ‘How are you?’ and waiting for a real answer, not just the canned answer.
"And so we don't actually have to wait for massive policy change.”
