Six months ago, Lauren Paquette was teaching in North Carolina and living at the poverty level with her husband and son. Now, that’s all changed.

“We started realizing, ‘We can’t afford to live here anymore,’” explains the Hobby Elementary School fourth-grade teacher. “I saw that HISD was coming back to Charlotte, and I said, ‘You know what, let’s just go and see what happens.’”

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That was this past July, and within weeks of meeting with HISD’s Teacher Recruitment team, Paquette had packed up her classroom and headed to Houston.

“For me, it was a $20,000 raise, and that’s huge,” said Paquette. “It’s almost a whole other salary.”
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