When she was a first grader, Melissa Walaitis would carefully copy her teacher's bulletin board display in her notebook. She knew in her heart she would become a teacher one day.

That's exactly what she did. For the past 24 years, Walaitis taught fourth and fifth graders, most recently in the Fox School District in suburban St. Louis.

This year, she didn't go back to school.

Walaitis is among the thousands of teachers who have left their classrooms before retirement age, contributing to significant teacher shortages in areas that haven't struggled with this issue before. Their reasons are diverse and multifold, including burnout from the challenges of the pandemic, political efforts to ban what they can say or teach, and a lack of administrative or community support.

Walaitis saw elementary school students with huge deficits in social development when they returned to the classroom post-pandemic. Fourth graders acted out in ways she had not seen before. No one seemed to know how to support teachers who were overwhelmed and struggling.

"I felt like I was never enough -- nothing I could do was enough for my students," she said. "When you see these insurmountable challenges, it really affects your mental health as a teacher."

She had already been working a second job as a travel agent for several years to support her family. At the end of the last school year, she decided to leave her first love -- teaching -- and focus on building her business.

"It says something if running a travel agency in 2020 was less stressful than teaching," she said.

Brandi Gunn, who taught middle school English for 16 years, also knew from a young age what she wanted to do.

"I feel like I was born to teach," Gunn said. "That's my thing. I love teaching."

But the past three years exposed too many ugly truths to her. During the pandemic, she saw many derogatory comments about teachers on social media. Then, English teachers across the country started getting bombarded with proposed book bans and political agendas.

All of this "noise," said Gunn, was "kind of defeating. It stole a lot of joy from doing the job we loved."

Even though her school district supported librarians and teachers against attempts to ban books about race and gender, the debates changed the way she thought about adding new material to her curriculum.

"Now we have to think about how a book will go over ... Are people going to be upset about it?" she said. "In a sense, the banning won."

Gunn has a master's degree in curriculum and instruction, plus years of experience, but she said she no longer felt the professional freedom to do her job the way she used to.

Now, she works as a flight attendant with Southwest Airlines. She misses teaching, but there are advantages to her new profession.

"Teachers are never really off the clock," she said. "Now, I can do my job and go home."

Stefanie Buscher taught instrumental music in the Rockwood, Missouri, school district for more than 11 years. In 2020, she gave birth to a preterm baby. After her maternity leave, she was required to come back in person for band rehearsals and football games. She was worried about the risk that COVID posed to her infant, so she ended up leaving the district -- and teaching altogether.

"I was a career teacher, but I felt I had no choice," she said. She felt like she had to choose between her career and protecting her baby. She also said she "made the mistake of watching a few Rockwood school board meetings online," where she heard community members criticizing teachers during an already-difficult time to teach.

"It's heartbreaking," said Buscher. "You're in it for the kids, but there are all these other things."

Buscher recently got her real estate license and now works as a real estate agent.

Parents and politicians who began attacking teachers during the pandemic, and who have only intensified their efforts since then, are starting to see the consequences of their behavior as districts around the country are experiencing teacher shortages. But the impact will be much bigger than just a few widely reported shortages.

School districts in poorer areas have had to contend with teacher shortages for decades. Now, middle-class public schools, as well as affluent schools serving predominantly white students, will suffer in similar ways: less-experienced educators, larger classrooms and fewer specialized subjects, for example.

You can't devalue, dehumanize and demoralize professionals and expect them all to just keep taking it.

When you make teachers the target, you're ultimately aiming at your own children.

Irfan Akbani was worried about one of his newly pledged fraternity brothers at St. Louis University this past spring.

The student seemed "off" -- not like his usual self. Akbani, then a junior, didn't think the younger student would confide in him, but he wanted someone to check in with him. Akbani approached the newly appointed mental health chair in his frat.

"There's something going on," he said. His fraternity brother promised to look into it.

Akbani has been on high alert with a heightened awareness about mental health issues.

Many on the campus have been.

Four male students died at SLU during the previous school year, with three confirmed as suicides.

"If you asked a lot of men, 'Who would you call if you needed help?' a lot of them would say, 'Nobody,'" Akbani said. He is convinced that a far greater number of his peers think about harming themselves than anyone is willing to admit.

Akbani's hunch is reflected in the most recent data available through the Missouri Assessment of College Health Behaviors, an annual survey of 8,000 to 11,000 students from 24 college campuses in the state. According to the 2021 data, 1 in 4 students said they had thought about suicide in the past year. That's an increase from 17% in 2016.

Nationally reported data about the years preceding the pandemic reveal a crisis that's been building for years: Suicides among children and young people aged 10 to 24 rose 57% from 2007 to 2018, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There's also a documented spike in rates of mental health disorders among young people. Prescriptions for antidepressants rose 38% for teenagers from 2015 to 2019, according to data from the mail-order pharmacy Express Scripts.

Suicide is not a single cause-and-effect phenomenon. Researchers have been studying why young people are feeling more anxious and depressed, with factors including a decline in sleep, decreasing amounts of physical activity, increased loneliness and the use of social media. For marginalized groups, such as LGBTQ students and Black students, contributing factors may also include discrimination, exposure to racialized violence, prior trauma and lack of access to resources. Missouri's survey also suggests correlations between suicidality and substance abuse and experiences with abuse in intimate relationships.

Katie Heiden-Rootes, a professor of family and community medicine at SLU's School of Medicine, is a principal investigator of a major grant focused on improving behavioral health services for children and adolescents.

"I think about suicidal behavior and ideation as the intersection of being hopeless and feeling helpless," she said. When young people feel unable to meet the challenges ahead of them, they can feel overwhelmed. Students may appear as though they have it all together, she said, while feeling tremendous self-doubt and fear internally.

Students who have struggled with anxiety from trauma experienced prior to arriving on campus may find it exacerbated by increased isolation and loneliness in college. In fact, persistent and unhealthy levels of loneliness are reported by college students nationally.

As a leader in several campus organizations, Akbani has heard several reasons why students, especially young men, are unwilling to seek help. Some are afraid of being seen differently or judged by their peers; others worry that a diagnosis might prevent them from pursuing a career in a certain field. And he said that some are scared of losing their rights and being hospitalized if they talk to a school counselor about suicidal feelings.

Findings from Missouri's College Health Behavior Survey found similar concerns from students. Of the students who reported having suicidal thoughts or having attempted suicide in the past year, only 38% sought assistance. Among those who did not, the greatest barriers were feeling shame, being afraid of judgment, lacking insurance or ability to pay for treatment, and fear of hospitalization. Another 40% reported that they didn't seek help because they didn't think they needed it.

Akbani said that demanding coursework is a top stressor for him, along with his other responsibilities: Last semester, as a pre-med student taking 18 hours of classes, he also served as an officer in three student organizations, belonged to a fraternity, volunteered at a soup kitchen and did extra science research outside of his classes.

"It does take a toll on me," he said. But he knows how hard it is to get into medical school, and feels he has to maintain this pace to have a competitive application.

"Suffering in silence is kind of the norm around men's mental health," he said.

That's something he is hoping will change.

When reproductive freedom was recently struck down by the Supreme Court, one of the first things I discussed with my teenagers was our religious beliefs about abortion.

My husband and I are Muslims and have raised our two kids in our Islamic faith. While there is a diversity of Islamic opinions on the issue, there’s a general consensus that the soul enters a fetus at 120 days. There are several conditions prior to this point at which abortion is permitted -- and even after this point, abortion is permissible if the mother’s life is in danger.

The complete abortion ban in Missouri, based on a minority religious view within Christianity, is in direct conflict with our own beliefs.

We are hardly alone in this situation. Clergy from across faiths are mobilizing to fight for their congregants’ religious freedom.

“For years, evangelical Christian voices were dominant in Jefferson City as legislators reduced access and finally banned abortion in Missouri. They imposed their narrow theology on the state, threatening the religious freedoms of the rest of us,” said Stacey Newman, who served as a state representative for nine years. “Prior to the legalization of abortion in 1973, Missouri clergy of all faiths were part of an underground network to protect women, and many are vowing to do the same today.”

Newman recently helped bring together Missouri religious leaders who support reproductive rights in an informal network of communication and support.

Jeffrey Stiffman, rabbi emeritus at Congregation Shaare Emeth, was among that group. Prior to the legal protections offered by Roe v. Wade, there was a local clergy advisory council, he said. When women in Missouri needed an abortion, these Christian and Jewish faith leaders would help coordinate flights to New York or Colorado and arrange transportation to clinics.

In the Jewish faith, preserving the mother’s life is paramount.

“The imposition of a ban on abortion restricts not only women’s rights, but also the rights of all religious minorities,” Stiffman said.

Several faith leaders pointed out the hypocrisy of politicians claiming to be pro-life but refusing to expand health care access for mothers and children. Why aren’t the politicians who fought to ban abortion working just as hard to lower Missouri’s high infant and maternal mortality rates?

“For me, that is theologically an injustice,” said Sonya Vann, an associate minister at Christ the King United Church of Christ. The state’s abortion ban tells her “that if I am outside this very narrow interpretation of Christianity, then I have no rights within my own religious freedom to think about what life even is. I very much have a problem with that.”

Two-thirds of states that limit abortion access, or that soon will, also have Religious Freedom Restoration Act laws, which limit when the government can restrict someone’s religious liberty. One such state is Florida, and religious leaders there -- including two Christians, three Jews, one Unitarian Universalist and a Buddhist -- have sued the state over its abortion ban. According to the lawsuits filed in Miami-Dade County, the law violates clergy members’ religious freedom because it prohibits them from counseling congregants about abortion in ways that align with their faiths.

Rev. Deb Krause, president of Eden Seminary, a Presbyterian minister and professor of the New Testament, says her study of the Bible does not find it to restrict access to abortion.

“I’m a New Testament scholar; it matters to me tremendously what the Bible says,” she said. But when it comes to the legal right to abortion, “it doesn’t matter what the Bible says because we are not a theocracy.”

Rabbi Andrea Goldstein, of Shaare Emeth, said she doesn’t understand how the state can impose a singular religious value when there is no conclusive proof of when life begins.

Her congregation has a monthly collection for the Missouri Abortion Fund. She said there is a groundswell of people of faith who want to give of their time, in addition to donating money.

“Everyone is trying to figure out the best way to mobilize direct service,” she said. “They want to show people who are scared (that) there are others who care about them.”

Religious scholars have drawn connections between the current fight for women’s bodily autonomy and the role clergy once played in guiding enslaved people toward freedom. They point out that proposals to ban travel for abortion care harken to fugitive slave laws.

“Much like the Underground Railroad, religious denominations and leaders took actions against the law at the time,” Vann said.

Rev. Rebecca Turner, of the United Church of Christ in Maplewood, points out that there has always been religious support for a woman’s right to choose an abortion. It is the duty of the clergy to help those in distress.

“I’m not afraid of standing up against unjust laws,” Turner said. “I think a lot of clergy may well have to do that to challenge the state on its treatment of women.”

Amen, sister.