This recent posting on social media caught my attention.

And it reminded me of a past tweet that attacked teachers as “unaccountable degree-holding babysitters.”

I assume Mr. Peck was referring to teachers. But I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt here. I will say that we really need to find the market rate of the degree-holding babysitter and flush this argument out here in NC.

I’m a public school teacher; therefore, by Mr. Peck’s Twitter tweet, I am also an unaccountable degree-holding babysitter. And I will save the accountability portion of his tweet for a later date. As far as baby-sitting goes, I just need to keep the kids occupied, fed, clothed, and let them play without destroying personal property.

So, welcome to http://www.care.com/babysitting-rates. It was the first babysitter calculator website that came in a simple Google search. It seems to be a reliable source.

Now, let’s enter in some numbers.

• For zip code, I used a Wake County code. That’s where the NC General Assembly meets.
• For number of children, I put in 4+.
• For experience, I entered 10+ because I have around 25 years of teaching experience.
• And hours? I put in 60 a week. Why? That’s how much time I usually put into all the facets of my job.

• 

The result is $18.50 dollars an hour.

But there is more math involved!

At $18.50 an hour for four kids, it would need to be higher because I usually deal with 22-30 kids at a time. Actually, in the past few years my class sizes have averaged over 28 students per class. That’s seven times the amount of kids I have would receive $18.50 an hour for babysitting. Maybe if I just multiplied $18.50 by 7, then I get an adjusted per hour rate of $129.50 an hour.

You know, I will give a markdown. Call it the “unaccountability discount” as Mr. Peck seems to think teachers are unaccountable. Half off! That makes the hourly rate $64.25.

Now, I work on average about 10 hours a school day. Multiplying the new rate ($63.00) by 10 hours and I get a rate of $647.50 a day. Holy cow! I am starting to like your new implied idea of recompense for us babysitters.

My contract stipulates that I teach kids 180 days a year. So my new daily rate ($647.50) multiplied by the number of contracted days, my “yearly” haul to babysit would be $116,550 for the school year.

Praise the Lord!

Now you may say, “Hey, you don’t spend all of your ten hours a day directly with students.” And that may be true, but with coaching, sponsoring, duties, and preparing to have things for your students to do while I babysit them, I can pretty much say that I am still actively engaging with the kids.

And this new rate that you seem to propose doesn’t even include weekends and other days that I spend at “daycare” to prepare to take care of kids.

So, let’s go back to the original question.

“So, what’s the market rate for an unaccountable degree-holding babysitter?”

The answer is $116,550 .

I’ll take it.