Texas Oil Boom: Bad For Teachers?

After she completed her year as a student teacher in southern Oregon, Joleena Malugani (pictured) couldn't find work close to home. So she accepted the best offer she got -- which meant moving to the heart of oil country, Odessa, Texas -- and learned that not everyone is lifted in a boom economy.

West Texas' Permian Basin, the country's largest source of crude, is turning Odessa and neighboring Midland into "boomtowns;" the average income of Midland residents is now the second highest in the country, ahead of San Francisco and New York City. But a booming economy can work against some employees. While private employers can pay high school dropouts with no experience $70,000 a year to work on oil fields, a teacher with a college degree and three years' experience earns about $45,000 a year in Midland, and the public sector can't raise wages much.

"You've got truck drivers out there, if they're working full-time and working overtime, they're making upwards of seventy, eighty thousand dollars a year," Superintendent Ryder Warren says. "That's getting close to two of my teachers."

As a result, teachers like Malugani pay New York prices for tiny apartments or camp out in hotels, as rents skyrocket and their classrooms overflow with students. "I hadn't really heard of Odessa, Texas, before. I hadn't been to Texas period," says Malugani. "I had no idea this was happening."