Schools help teachers with a new kind of homework: finding a place to live

Taryn Perkins remembers searching for Thoreau, N.M. on a map.

Last summer, she and her husband were both offered teaching jobs there that seemed perfect, and the couple had always loved small, rural communities. But Thoreau seemed … really small and really rural.

“Where would we even live when we get there?” Ms. Perkins recalls thinking. The school district soon told Ms. Perkins and her husband about the teacherage: a neighborhood of small, affordable homes in Thoreau built exclusively for the town’s teachers.

“We were ecstatic to find that out,” says

A real incentive Helping teachers stay in the profession