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Rural Texas school districts will switch to four-day weeks this fall due to staff shortages. Florida asks veterans without teaching backgrounds to enter classrooms. Arizona allows college students to step in and instruct children.
America’s teacher shortage has reached crisis levels, and school officials everywhere are scrambling to make sure that as students return to classrooms, someone will be there to educate them.
“I’ve never seen it this bad,” Dan Domenech, executive director of the Association of School Superintendents, said of the teacher shortage. “Right now it’s number one on the list of problems affecting school districts … necessity is the mother of invention, and struggling districts are going to have to come up with some solutions.”
This year’s students need summer school. Some districts cannot staff.
It is difficult to know exactly how many classrooms in the United States are short of teachers for the 2022-2023 school year; no national database accurately tracks the problem. But reports have emerged at the state and district levels across the country detailing staff shortages that run from the hundreds to the thousands, and remain open as summer winds quickly to a close.
The Nevada State Education Association estimated that roughly 3,000 teaching jobs remained unfilled in the state’s 17 school districts as of early August. In a January report, the Illinois Association of Regional School Superintendents found that 88 percent of school districts statewide had “teacher shortage issues,” while 2,040 teacher positions were vacant or were filled with “less than qualified” hiring. And in the Houston area, the five largest school districts report that between 200 and 1,000 teaching positions remain open.
Carlton Jenkins, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District in Wisconsin, said teachers are in such short supply that superintendents across the country have developed a network of whispers to alert each other when educators move between states.
“We’re at a point where if I have people who want to move to California, I call and give a referral very quickly,” he said. “And if someone comes from somewhere else, say Minnesota, I have superintendent colleagues in Minnesota, they call and say, ‘Hey, I have teachers coming your way.'”
Why are America’s schools so understaffed? Experts point to a confluence of factors, including pandemic-induced teacher burnout, low wages and the sense among some educators that politicians and parents, and sometimes their own school board members, have little respect for their profession amid a growing education culture war that has seen many districts and states pass policies and laws that restrict what teachers can say about history, race, racism, gender and US sexual orientation, as well as LGBTQ issues.
“The political situation in the United States, combined with the legitimate consequences of covid, has created this shortage,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “This scarcity is artificial.”
Interim solutions to staff shortages run the gamut, from giving teachers better pay to increasing the number of people who qualify as educators to increasing class sizes. But many of these temporary solutions are likely to harm students by diminishing their ability to learn, predicted Dawn Etcheverry, president of the Nevada State Education Association.
“When you start doubling classes, teachers don’t have that one-on-one ability with students, that personal ability to understand what the student needs,” both academically and socially, Etcheverry said.
Danika Mills, a former school therapist and state director of Unite Us, a technology company that connects health and social service providers, said this decline in the quality of education comes at the worst possible time. American schoolchildren are still struggling to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, he said, and months of online learning wreaked havoc on students’ academic progress, social skills and mental health.
“We know that students of all ages suffered a sharp decline in academic performance during the pandemic, and now is the time to correct those changes,” Mills said. “Instead, I believe and fear that we may be facing an even greater decline.”
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Nevada’s Clark County School District, which serves 320,000 students, is one of many school systems taking a scattered approach to staffing shortages by trying several solutions at once. Hoping to reduce its roughly 1,300 teaching vacancies, the district has increased starting teacher pay by $7,000 and is offering a $4,000 “relocation bonus” to new teachers who move from out of state or more than 100 miles. In an interview, Superintendent Jesus F. Jara said the district also gives employees a “retention bonus” of up to $5,000 to stay on the job.
But with school scheduled to start in a week, the district is still only 92 percent staffed, Jara said. And despite the “around-the-clock” efforts of his HR team, he doesn’t think the district will close the gap over time.
“I’m still worried, I’m still losing sleep at night, and I’m not going to fill the remaining 8 percent of our classrooms on Monday,” Jara said.
On Aug. 8, the district will be forced to implement patchwork measures, Jara said, such as pulling administrators out of the central office to work as substitutes and combining multiple classes into large spaces such as auditoriums or gymnasiums.
“Regarding the care, I think they’re doing everything they can,” said Jeff Horn, executive director of the Clark County Association of School Administrators. “It’s a mess.”
Other districts and states are trying more unorthodox solutions. A new Arizona state law, signed by Gov. Doug Ducey (R) last month, allows college students to hold teaching jobs. A similar law, which took effect in Florida on July 1, offers K-12 teaching jobs to military veterans who served for at least four years. Veterans do not need high school diplomas, but must have earned at least 60 college credits while maintaining at least a 2.5 grade point average.
Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, said the need for teachers in his state is dire: His association estimates there are at least 8,000 teacher vacancies this year, up from 5,000 last year previous But Spar doesn’t think the veterans program is “really a solution” because it could lead to unqualified people entering classrooms.
“I think we all appreciate what our military veterans have done for our country in terms of protecting our freedoms both here and abroad,” he said. “But just because you were in the military doesn’t mean you’re going to be a great teacher.”
Meanwhile, the school board and superintendent of Arizona’s Tucson Unified School District are considering making up for the math teacher shortage (the system is short 24, along with 102 other teachers) by sending a small number of students to apprenticeships online by part. of the day. The district may hire virtual math teachers from a Chicago-based online education company, the Tucson Sentinel reported. The superintendent did not respond to a request for comment.
And in Texas’ Mineral Wells Independent School District and Chico Independent School District, officials have switched to a four-day school week for the upcoming academic year. In both districts, which are small and rural, school leaders said the change is intended to attract and retain teachers amid a significant staffing shortage, the Texas Tribune reported. Neither district responded to a request for comment.
In Wisconsin’s Madison School District, Superintendent Jenkins said that, a month before school starts on Sept. 1, officials are still working to fill 199 teaching vacancies and 124 non-teaching positions.
But no child will be without an adult in the classroom in the fall, he said, because the district has managed to recruit 269 qualified substitute teachers, mostly by raising substitute pay rates this spring. Jenkins said she hopes that over the course of the year, the district will be able to convince at least some of those substitutes to become full-time teachers.
“We’re just going to go after them,” Jenkins said. Initial prompts will include “some immediate supplies. Every teacher likes their calendar, right? So we give them calendars, little things, and we have other things planned that I don’t want to reveal, because I don’t want to ruin the surprise.
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In Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia’s largest district, Superintendent Michelle Reid said 97 percent of teaching positions are filled about three weeks before the semester begins.
Reid said the district of nearly 179,000 students is now making an “all-out” effort to fill those jobs.
“We’re recruiting and processing applications and hiring educators around the clock, really,” he said. “It is our intention to continue to recruit and hire teachers on a daily basis as we approach the start of the school year.”
However, the district has begun developing safety plans, Reid said. While the details vary from campus to campus, one possible strategy is to send administrators with teaching licenses back into classrooms, but “hopefully we won’t have to use that.”
Leslie Houston, president of the Fairfax Education Association, said she had never seen so many teachers leave the job in her career because they felt slighted, mostly by politicians and some parents.
“When people were bashing teachers and being really nasty about what we’re doing and what we’re not doing,” Houston said, “I don’t think .