When Sharon Haynie signed on to teach early morning seminary almost 30 years, the volunteer instructor expected the predawn rousings, the many lesson preps and struggles to elicit thoughtful responses from sleepy students. What she didn’t anticipate: The hit to her bank account.
Haynie, who lives in rural south-central Colorado, has taught the weekday classes for high schoolers in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 1997. During that time, she estimates she has spent thousands of dollars — roughly $40 a month in recent school years — of her own money, much of it on standard classroom materials.
The seminary superfan is not complaining. The sacrifice is worth it, Haynie said, and one she can afford. She realizes, however, that’s not the case for everyone.
More than a decade ago, she and a fellow early morning seminary teacher, Jenny Smith, launched a Facebook group for instructors. Surprise over the costs of the calling is a regular topic, Smith said, in the 19,000-member community, especially among its newer members.
“Early morning seminary is,” Smith, who lives in Virginia, said, “an expensive calling.”
Counting the costs
Smith, who is no longer a seminary teacher, isn’t basing this assessment on just her own experience.
Curious as to how much of the program’s financial burden teachers were shouldering, she sent a survey to members of the Facebook group in 2020. The questionnaire amassed 155 respondents, the majority from within the United States. Results showed that they spent an average of $243 a school year.
Smith then asked respondents to rate their difficulty level paying for seminary expenses — from 1 (no difficulty) to 10 (extreme difficulty). Nearly 40% selected a 5 or higher.
These findings worried Smith, who spent the next four years trying to raise awareness of the issue with the Church Educational System and other Latter-day Saint leaders. After all, she reasoned, the global faith, with a piggy bank worth hundreds of billions, has the money.
“Like most who serve in the church, I don’t mind buttoning my belt a little tighter, and have, for the kingdom,” Smith said. “But this is not 1924, and the church is on firm financial ground. It can fund seminary. This is fixable.”
What few responses she’s received to date from church higher-ups, she said, have been dismissive.
When asked about the study’s findings, church spokesperson Sam Penrod stated that CES, headquartered in Salt Lake City and responsible for overseeing the seminary program, “is grateful to those members of the church who accept a volunteer calling as a seminary instructor to teach the gospel and influence the youth of the church.”
CES, he added, “provides the manuals and materials” for students and teachers.
That’s true, those interviewed said, if you don’t mind having a strictly lecture-based class in which students are on their phones accessing the scriptures and other materials digitally. The problem, current and former teachers interviewed for this story agreed, is that this is not an ideal setup for drowsy teens, some of whom don’t have a smartphone, to study the Book of Mormon at the crack of dawn.
“You’ve got to find a way to teach the doctrine,” Haynie said, “other than, ‘Let’s open our scriptures and read and you tell me what you think,’ when they’re so tired their eyes are rolling in the back of their head.”
And that, she said, “is where the money comes in.”
Where is the money going?
The biggest expenditure teachers surveyed cited: supplies.
Many early morning teachers hold classes in their homes. That means finding ways to outfit a living room as a classroom each day with whiteboards, clipboards and audiovisual equipment.
Those who teach at a nearby meetinghouse typically have a few more resources — a chalkboard and a TV — but run into commuting costs, particularly for those living in rural and sparsely populated areas.
Poster boards, colored pencils, candy prizes, items for object lessons, journals for students to record their thoughts (an activity the manual often suggests) — these all add up, particularly for those with larger classes.
Shauna Hostetler, who taught seminary in West Palm Beach, Florida, from 2012 to 2020, estimates she “easily” spent $1,000 a year for classes of 15 to 30 students.
A top expense was paper and ink, a point echoed by other instructors.
“There’s always,” Hostetler said, “a lot of copies to make.”
Although she had access to the meetinghouse copier, she found it unreliable. Even when it did work, she had to buy paper to fill it. Like the other teachers interviewed for this story, she almost always wound up simply printing off what she needed at home.
What the church budgets
Latter-day Saints are accustomed to cracking open their wallets to contribute to church activities and programs — a function of the volunteer approach that pervades a church run by a lay ministry.
What makes early morning seminary different, Smith and the other teachers argued, is that unlike, say, the Young Men and Young Women programs, seminary does not represent a standard line item in ward (congregational) and stake (regional) budgets.
Instead, teachers seeking reimbursement must submit receipts to their assigned CES representative — that is, for those who know to do so in the first place. Of the 155 who participated in Smith’s survey, 16% said they weren’t aware they could be reimbursed at all.
Those who had been informed of a budget for the class said they had been told they could be reimbursed for up to $50 a school year. In some cases, this was supplemented by wards and stakes that voluntarily contributed varying amounts from their budgets.
Indeed, Penrod noted in his statement that “local leaders may direct funds from the ward or stake budget to cover additional needs” beyond the resources CES provides.
The problem with this approach, instructors said, is that teachers are then dependent on leadership roulette — that is, finding a bishop or stake president open to helping — to get the funding they need. There’s also the issue of who would do the asking.
Haynie estimates that about 75% of the Facebook group’s members are women, who she fears might hesitate to ask their all-male leadership for money out of fear of “making waves.”
Finally, for Smith, budget standardization is also a matter of equity.
“Your child’s seminary experience,” she said, “should not depend on how wealthy their teacher is.”
In the Intermountain West
Early morning seminary, while offered in Utah and other Latter-day Saint strongholds in the Intermountain West, is less common, with most students opting to take the courses through released time during the school hours.
Rather than being held in a teacher’s living room or a meetinghouse, these classes take place in seminary buildings — often a short stroll from the students’ schools — equipped with desks, whiteboards, copy machines and AV equipment. Instead of relying on volunteer instructors, these classes are taught by full-time paid CES professionals.
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Latter-day Saint teens attend seminary, which in Utah and other places in the Intermountain West is often taught by a paid teacher in the Church Educational System.
Hostetler recently spent time in one such building in Lehi and found her mind instinctively tallying up the costs of all the teaching tools she saw.
“They’ve got projectors,” she recalled thinking, “meanwhile, I’m buying batteries.”
Recommendations going forward
Easing the financial burden on early morning seminary teachers trying to liven up their lessons and keep students engaged begins, Smith argues in her study, with engaging stake leadership to create a greater sense of ownership over the seminary classes, and their costs, in their areas.
She also recommends a larger CES budget based on a per-student rather than per-class basis, plus annual start-up money to cover consumable expenses like printer paper, card stock and markers, plus funds for permanent classroom items, such as whiteboards, televisions, laptops and digital projectors.
“This is a high school course,” Hostetler stressed. “And we teach at that level.”
In the meantime, Haynie said early morning seminary teachers will keep doing what they’ve always done — sacrifice time, sleep and, yes, money to give their students the best possible experience.
“We do this because we love the kids and the gospel,” she said. “And we want to help grow their testimonies.”
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