When Megan Gaither was 6 years old, she came home from school everyday and lined up her stuffed animals. Using her favorite chalkboard, she taught them what she had learned in class that day.
From a young age, one thing was clear – she loved learning and knew she wanted to become a teacher.
Gaither, who is from Missouri, went on to do just that.
In 2018, she graduated from Missouri Baptist University with high honors and received her English and education degrees. As she worked toward her graduate degrees, Gaither got her dream job as an English Language Arts teacher at St. Clair High School in Missouri, where she also coached varsity cheerleading.
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Like most college students, Gaither took out students loans to pay for her higher education. After graduating, repayment on those loans had been paused due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But after a two-year moratorium and a slew of legal battles, the Biden administration announced in November 2022 that it was extending the payment pause one last time, set to expire in the fall.
For Gaither, who is a single mother, the moratorium had provided a small financial relief. But with payments resuming in October, she knew there was no way she could possibly pay her loans — totaling about $126,000 — on her teaching salary. Gaither did not disclose how much she made teaching at St. Clair, but according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's public pay database, the median annual salary for a teacher at the high school is $38,271.
“I’m going to have to find a way to make more money, whether that be go to a different district, or even do something outside of education, which I really didn’t want to do, because it is my passion,” Gaither told NBC.
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As she contemplated ways to close the financial gap, an idea that started as a joke soon became an actual plan as the reality of the money she needed set in.
Turning to OnlyFans for extra cash
In May, Gaither launched her OnlyFans account to supplement her salary and began posting a month later.
OnlyFans is a subscription service for people over 18 years old that allows individual creators to monetize their private content, according to their website. The site allows celebrities to interact with fans and during the pandemic it become known as a safe place for sex workers to connect with clients. OnlyFans says it has 220 million users and over 3 million content creators who have collectively earned $10 billion.
The ever-learner, Gaither spent weeks doing research on how to build a following and utilized those tools to grow her fan base, noting that at one point she was in the top 6% of creators, a measurement based on engagement, on the platform. She also began making money. Gaither declined to disclose how much she made on the site.
She never showed her face and used an alias to maintain anonymity. When the school year began in the fall, Gaither said she had financial freedom for the first time in her career. But that experience was short lived.
A few weeks into the school year, a fellow teacher at St. Clair High School was placed on leave after officials discovered she had an OnlyFans account. Brianna Coppage, a 28-year-old English teacher, told KMOV-TV she needed to earn extra money and getting a second job wasn't very feasible.
"We don’t get to stop working when we leave the school day," Coppage told the outlet. "We don’t get to grade all 130 students’ papers during the day. It’s just not possible when you’re teaching, so we take that work home with us on the evenings and on the weekends. Getting a second job is really not possible.”
Coppage later resigned.
Concerned about her own OnlyFans account and the risk of losing her job, Gaither immediately deleted her account.
“As soon as school was out, I went to my car and deleted everything,” Gaither said. “I didn’t want this to happen. I didn’t want to lose my passion for teaching, and so I didn’t care about any of it and I just got rid of it.”
She also lost all of the money she had not yet cashed out of her account.
Nearly a month after the incident with Coppage, Gaither was finally beginning to feel that she was in the clear: her deleted OnlyFans account was no longer hanging over her and she could continue teaching.
Everything changed after she attended a Halloween party with Coppage. A video of the two was posted on Coppage's account. Gaither's face was not shown in the video, but when an image of her at the same party wearing the same outfit from the video was posted on X, formerly Twitter, "that was enough for speculation,” Gaither said.
The following Monday at school, some of her students began asking her about the photo, which was circulating on social media. Students tacked a note on Gaither’s classroom door saying they knew “her secret.”
With her own OnlyFans account no longer in existence, Gaither planned to deny the allegations. That is until the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reached out to her and she decided to speak out.
“I very quickly made the decision. Do I let them post the wrong story about me, or do I tell my story?” Gaither said. “I weighed the options and I thought telling my story was the better option.”
Gaither told NBC she doesn't think it was her students that tipped off local press, but believes one of her colleagues called media outlets to tell them about her OnlyFans account.
Soon after, Gaither received a letter advising her she was placed on leave as the school investigates. The letter does not say her leave was related to her OnlyFans account, but Gaither believes that's the real reason. She said she is not allowed to speak to the specificities cited in the letter. Gaither is still on leave while the investigation is ongoing.
St. Clair High School and the district have not responded to NBC's requests for comment. However, the superintendent of St. Clair R-XIII School District said in a statement to McClatchy News in response to Coppage's leave that the district “was recently notified that an employee may have posted inappropriate media on one or more internet sites.”
“The district has engaged legal counsel to conduct a comprehensive investigation of this matter,” Dr. Kyle Kruse said, without naming Coppage. “Details regarding specific personnel cannot be discussed at this time.”
'A career in education must not be a lifetime sentence of financial worry'
The plight of a teacher struggling financially is not unique to Gaither or Coppage.
Teacher salaries have fallen further and further behind those of their college-educated peers in other fields, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The national average for a teacher's starting salary is $42,844. Missouri, where Gaither teaches, ranks the lowest in the country at $34,052. Meanwhile, the cost of living for a family of four in the state is $77,197, CNBC reports.
A report from the National Education Association published earlier this summer revealed "an alarming trend of decreased educator pay," coupled with cuts to public schools that are leading to teacher turnovers at historic levels.
“Educators who dedicate their lives to students shouldn’t be struggling to support their own families. A career in education must not be a lifetime sentence of financial worry. Who will choose to teach under those circumstances?” NEA President Becky Pringle said in a statement. “There is a perfect storm brewing in public schools. Low wages and a lack of professional respect are leaving too many classrooms without teachers."
Their frustrations have ignited protests and strikes in major cities and in rural areas in recent years.
The strikes were successful in increasing wages, however, surging inflation erased any meaningful gains. The national average public school teacher salary in 2021-2022 increased 2% from the previous year to $66,745, according to the NEA, while inflation peaked around 9% during the same period. Adjusted for inflation, teachers are making $3,644 less, on average, than they did 10 years ago, the organization found.
Adding to the strain on educators, more than 90% of teachers also use their own money to buy classroom necessities for their students each year, despite low pay and crippling student loans, according to NEA.
This harsh reality has forced an increasing number of teachers to moonlight in other careers. An analysis from the Pew Research Center found one third of new teachers took on second jobs to generate additional income in order to make ends meet and overall, 16% of all teachers had non-school jobs over the summer. Most notably, 18% of teachers had second jobs during the school year.
Several teachers across the country have made headlines for losing their jobs after their schools discovered their OnlyFans account. Yet, many say they didn't feel had a choice under the financial strain of their low teaching salary.
'I'm in so much debt'
Gaither and Coppage aren't the only educators reportedly turning to OnlyFans to supplement their wages.
Courtney Tillia had a similar experience and left the field to chase that same financial freedom.
Tillia graduated in 2010 from Arizona State University with her teaching degree and began her career at a Phoenix school teaching “severe special needs kids that could not go to a public school, because they were physically aggressive,” she told NBC.
Several years into teaching, she found herself depressed and suffering from anxiety that was exacerbated by her financial situation: Tillia was deep in student loan debt and making $42,000, before taxes, annually.
She said she had always been told that teachers do not make a lot of money, but didn’t realize just how hard it would be to survive financially until it came time to start paying off her student loans for her undergraduate degree.
“I got my first student loan repayment and they wanted 50% of my income,” Tillia said. “I went to an in-state school, I didn’t do anything real crazy … how am I going to live? I'm barely able to survive on this.”
Tillia filed to defer her payments and returned to school to obtain her master's, hoping the additional degree might help give her a pay boost in the long-run.
“I graduated two years later and made $20 more per paycheck with a master’s degree,” Tillia said.
The extra cash wasn’t enough to help pay off her student loans, so she gambled on taking out additional loans to obtain her doctorate. With the higher degree, she believed she could qualify to work in more senior positions at schools, leading to higher salaries.
But after completing three years of her doctorate program, administration officials told her she would likely not make more money at that school with the higher degree. At the time, the average salary for a school counselor, a role Tillia was aspiring to, was $52,900 a year in the Phoenix area, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Tillia felt deflated. She had racked up $140,000 in debt due to student loans and didn't know how she would be able to pay it off.
“What am I doing? I am doing all the things that society has told me,” Tillia said. “I was following the path and I’m unhappy, I’m unfulfilled and I am struggling financially. I am in so much debt.”
Her husband was concerned about her well being and encouraged her to focus on doing things she enjoyed outside of work.
Tillia loved going to the gym and found a new purpose in bodybuilding. She specifically enjoyed posting photos of her progress on her Instagram account.
Soon after, followers were sending her direct messages asking her for "private content." Then one day, a follower requested a 1 and 1/2 minute video and agreed to pay her $300. It was the first time Tillia monetized off her image on social media.
“I was like, wait, this is more than I make in a whole day with all these degrees,” Tillia said.
The exchange empowered Tillia to launch a side hustle on OnlyFans, where customers pay for access to exclusive content from creators. It didn't take long before she was making serious money on the platform.
Tillia eventually quit her teaching job and moved her family from Phoenix to Los Angeles, California. She told NBC she now makes more money in a month than she did in a year as a teacher.
What's next?
Now, Tillia uses her platform to help other women gain financial freedom through OnlyFans training courses on creating content, marketing, social media and safety. She offers the courses for free to all educators.
“I don’t want teachers to continue to struggle while we sit here and debate whether they should get paid more,” Tillia said. “That’s why I have resources available for them.”
Meanwhile, Gaither launched a new OnlyFans account and is making more money on the site. She said she plans on writing a book about her life.
“I am passionate about telling my side and telling my story,” Gaither said.
She also hopes she can return to teaching one day, this time at the college level.
NBC's Danielle Abreu contributed to this report.
