The School District of Beloit annually lost almost a quarter of its teachers on average during or right after the 2021-22, 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years — far higher than the loss rates for those years for both the adjacent School District of Beloit Turner and the state as a whole.
| School year | Beloit | Beloit-Turner | Statewide average loss rate |
| 2021-22 | 26.9% | 10.6% | 13.1% |
| 2022-23 | 20.1% | 13.9% | 15.1% |
| 2023-24 | 24.7% | 7.5% | 14.0% |
| Average | 23.9% | 10.7% | 14.0% |
The difference between the two adjacent districts was particularly stark in 2023-24, when Beloit lost 24.7 percent of its teachers, more than three times the percentage loss in Turner. Figures are not yet available for loss during and after the 2024-25 school year that just ended.
Looked at another way, only 51 percent of the 468 teachers in the Beloit district during the 2021-22 school year remained by the 2024-25 school year, an exceedingly high rate of churn. Only half stayed.
The School District of Beloit has been steadily shedding enrollment since 2015. In the last three years alone, the number of students in the district dropped from 5,534 to 5,165 to 5,098 to 4,958, decreases of 6.7 percent, 1.3 percent, and 2.8 percent.
The rate of teacher loss is much more precipitous than the rate of decrease in student enrollment, though, raising questions about why so many teachers are leaving, how they are being replaced, and how exceedingly high rates of churn and the loss of veteran teachers affect the students, and, indeed, the future of the district.
Beloit’s problems stand out in particular when compared to the district right next door. Turner has steadily increased student enrollment, has much lower rates of teacher loss and, in fact, is attracting both students and teachers from the School District of Beloit.
Beloit area map
The following map of the Beloit area shows how closely intertwined the two districts are. The area shaded in blue is the School District of Beloit. The areas shaded in green are Turner. The line in red demarcates the legal boundaries of the City of Beloit.
As the map shows, the boundaries between the City of Beloit and the School District of Beloit are not identical. There are parts of the city that cross into Turner. Nor are the district boundaries contiguous. In the northeast corner of the intersection of I-43 and I-90, there is an island of Turner — albeit undeveloped land — surrounded by the Beloit district.
Student enrollment in the two districts
In 1998, the School District of Beloit enrolled just over 6,900 students. It hit a peak enrollment of 7,169 in 2006 but plummeted all the way down to 4,958 in the most recent school year — a 28 percent drop since 1998.
In 1998, Turner enrolled 1,068 students and, after years of increases, was up to 1,669 by the most recent school year — a 56 percent increase.
Much of the growth in the Turner district is the result of open-enrollment students who live in but do not want to attend other districts. In school year 2023-24, for instance, Turner gained 567 students and lost only 123 — a net gain of 444 — through public school open enrollment, the means by which families may send children to a public school district other than the one where they live. Beloit, meanwhile, lost 917 students through open enrollment and gained only 117, a net loss of 800. Many of those students likely transferred to Turner.
Without open enrollment transfers, Beloit would be down 21 percent between 2015 and 2024 instead of its actual decrease of 29 percent. As for Turner, rather than enrollment having increased by 10.8 percent between 2015 and 2024, enrollment would have decreased by 4 percent over that period without open enrollment.
Teacher numbers
The graph below shows the estimated number of contracted teachers for each district based on Department of Public Instruction reports. Beloit reached its maximum teacher headcount in 2009 at 518 contracted teachers. That level remained steady until 2014 but has declined to just 337 in the 2024-25 school year.
Meanwhile, Turner has increased headcounts at a consistent rate. In 1998, there were 72 teachers. In the most recent school year, 2024-25, the district reported a staff of 107 teachers.
There were a handful of teachers who transferred from one of the districts to the other, but the direction was highly skewed. Over the 30 years of data available, 23 teachers transferred out of the School District of Beloit directly into Turner, while only seven transferred from Turner into Beloit. The largest transfer occurred after the 2019-20 school year, when five teachers left Beloit for Turner.
To put the two school districts on a comparable footing, we calculated the rate of teachers per hundred students enrolled. In 1998, both districts had nearly identical teacher-student ratios. The rates in the two districts have headed in opposite directions for the last two decades but are now again quite similar. There were 6.8 teachers per 100 students in Beloit and 6.4 per 100 students in Turner during the school year 2024-25.
District loss rate
The graph above breaks down the loss rate for the School District of Beloit. The top line, in blue, shows the total loss rate, while the red and green lines show the two subsets: exits and transfers. Exits are teachers who have left public teaching in Wisconsin entirely; transfers are teachers who have left to work in another public school district.
The first trend that becomes clear is that exits have moved upward over the past five years and in the school year 2024-25 were 17.5 percent. The second is that transfers, which were a negligible component in the pre-Act 10 era, have grown to a substantial share of teacher loss — between 6 and 9 percent of faculty annually — over the past decade. The confluence of these two trends has created the highest levels of overall teacher loss seen in the district over the past 30 years.
Teacher loss in Turner is a different story. The overall rate, with some fluctuation, has gone slowly but generally down over the past three decades and was 7.5 percent in 2024-25. Transfers to other districts are minimal, only 1.89 percent in 2024-25.
In the most recent year, teacher loss in Beloit was 24.7 percent while teacher loss in Turner was 7.5 percent.
A word about new hires
Teacher loss in this paper, again, refers to the total number or percentage of teachers leaving a district. Some of those teachers are replaced every year, and part of what we will explore in the interview portion of this analysis is whether teacher quality is suffering as the districts strive to replace veteran talent. Prior Badger Institute research shows that some teachers in certain subjects and schools are harder to replace than others.
School-level loss
On a school-by-school basis, every traditional school in the Beloit district has a higher rate of teacher loss than its historic average level. The chart above shows the percentage of teachers that left Beloit schools, either by quitting teaching entirely or transferring to another district. (It does not count teachers who transferred from one Beloit institution to another.)
The bars in blue show the average loss rates from the beginning of the period through the 2023-24 school year for each school. The bars in red show the rates of loss between the most recent school years, 2023-24 to 2024-25. The annotations show the actual fraction of teachers who left. Fran Fruzen Intermediate school, for example, saw 16 of its 39 teachers exit or transfer out of Beloit between school years. Also included is a statewide average school-level teacher loss rate.
This chart shows the comparison between the most recent and the historic average loss rates for Turner schools. Again, a teacher is counted only if she or he left teaching entirely or left the Turner district; intradistrict moves are not counted. For the Turner district, all schools had lower loss rates than even the lowest traditional Beloit school, as well as being below the statewide average. For three out of four of the schools, recent loss rates were lower than that school’s respective historic average.
Teacher loss by subject area
The figure above looks at teacher loss by subject area across all teachers in Beloit and Turner. Due to the smaller sample, averages were taken over the past three years and compared to the average of all years prior. Social studies, science, English, math and history have current teacher loss rates higher than the long-term average, while teachers of art, music, and physical education left at lower rates than their predecessors.
Conclusion
The School District of Beloit is struggling. Enrollment is declining at rapid rates, teachers are leaving the district at higher rates, and these problems are worsening over time. Many of the teachers are being replaced, but the level of churn is extremely high. In contrast, the Turner district, which is closely intertwined with the Beloit district, is small but steadily growing, and it maintains a steady workforce. Open enrollment data reveals that many Beloit families try to send their children to Turner schools instead. The information presented in this report only scratches the surface of the challenges facing Beloit, but it raises alarm bells that must be addressed.
The Badger Institute will dive deeper into the subject by conducting a study of current and former teachers from the Beloit area to learn about their first-hand experiences in the districts, where they originally came from, and why so many are leaving. Our future research will identify ways to increase teacher retention and attract new talent from the teacher preparation pipeline.
Wyatt Eichholz is the Policy and Legislative Associate of the Badger Institute.
Any use or reproduction of Badger Institute articles or photographs requires prior written permission. To request permission to post articles on a website or print copies for distribution, contact Badger Institute Marketing Director Matt Erdman at matt@badgerinstitute.org.
Submit a comment
Go to the full page to view and submit the form.
