How about elaborating now?
Most frum women working in public school are not regular teachers (though a similar case can probably be made for that type of job too), so let's take speech therapy as an example.
Here's a
link to the salary scale. Right out of graduate school you'd start at the column labeled Approved MA, row 1A, for $51,425. But you can step up to the columns at the right of the page just by adding credits. So let's say you don't want to deal with that during your first school year, so you leave it off to the summer. You take 30 credits of CLEPs (extremely easy to do, it's pretty pathetic) over the summer, and with your year of service, the next year you'll be in the rightmost column, row 2A, for $60,224. You'll then get modest raises over the next few years, till 5 years of service, after which you'll jump to $75,796.
On top of that, if you're working in a District 75 (special ed) school, you have the option of working summer school for an extra 17% of your salary. The amount of days you end up working is less than 17% of the rest of the year, and the environment is generally much more relaxed, so it's a no brainer to work summer too. If you work in a regular school you can still try to get a summer job, but I think you're only guaranteed a spot if you work in D75 the rest of the year.
Next comes schedule. You will work a lot less hours in year (even with summer school) than the average 40 hour desk job, for 2 reasons. First of all, most schools are something like 8-3, maybe more, but definitely not an 8 hour workday. Second of all, here's a list of days schools are closed:
9/2: Labor Day
9/5-9/6: Rosh Hashana
10/14: Columbus Day
11/11: Veterans Day
11/28-11/29: Thanksgiving
12/23-1/1: Winter Recess
1/20: MLK Day
2/17-2/21: Midwinter Recess
4/14-4/22: Spring Recess
5/26: Memorial Day
If you're not working summer, you're then usually off from the end of June to Labor Day. If you are working summer, there's usually a day or 2 before you report for summer school, and then 2 or 3 weeks at the end of the summer.
All in all that's a lot of time off, and earn an additional day per month of Cumulative Absence Reserve (basically sick days) which you can accumulate up to 200 days. You get paid for half of the days you have left when you retire, at your salary at that time.
Last but not least is the benefits. You get very good medical coverage for free, as well as dental, vision, and prescription as part of your union dues. And you also get a real pension, as in the defined benefit type that's rarer than an endangered species these days.
Sounds like a pretty good deal, no? Sorry for the big OT post.