Comment Rural school districts in Texas are switching to four-day weeks this fall due to staff shortages. Florida is asking veterans without a teaching background to enter the classrooms. Arizona allows college students to step in and teach kids. America’s teacher shortage has hit crisis levels — and school officials everywhere are scrambling to ensure 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 issues facing school districts … necessity is the mother of invention, and hard-pressed districts are going to have to come up with some solutions.” Students this year need summer school. Some districts cannot staff it. It is difficult to know exactly how many classrooms in the US are short of teachers for the 2022-2023 school year. no national database accurately tracks the issue. But state and district-level reports have emerged across the country detailing staffing gaps ranging from hundreds to thousands — and they remain wide open as the summer winds rapidly to a close. The Nevada State Education Association estimated that about 3,000 teaching positions remained vacant in the state’s 17 school districts as of early August. In a January report, the Illinois Association of District School Superintendents found that 88 percent of school districts statewide were experiencing “teacher shortage issues” — while 2,040 teaching positions were either vacant or filled with “under-qualified” hires ». And in the Houston area, the five largest school districts all 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 so scarce that superintendents across the country have developed a network of whispers to alert each other when teachers move between states. “We’re at a point right now where if I have people who want to move to California, I call and give a report very quickly,” he said. “And if someone comes from another place — say, Minnesota — I have fellow superintendents in Minnesota, they call and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got teachers coming your way. “ Why are America’s schools so understaffed? Experts point to a confluence of factors, including teacher burnout due to the pandemic, low pay and the sense among some teachers that politicians and parents — and sometimes their school board members — don’t respect their profession amid an escalating war. educational culture that has seen many districts and states pass policies and laws that limit what teachers can say about US history, race, racism, gender, sexual orientation, and 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 lack is contrived.” Intermediate solutions to staff shortages run the gamut from offering teachers better pay to increasing the number of people who qualify as teachers to increasing class sizes. But many of these temporary fixes are likely to harm students by reducing their ability to learn, predicted Dawn Etcheverry, president of the Nevada State Education Association. “When you start doubling classes, teachers don’t have that face-to-face with the 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. America’s school students are still struggling to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, he said, and the devastating months of online learning have taken a toll on students’ academic progress, social skills and mental health. “We know that students of all ages have suffered sharp declines in academic achievement during the pandemic, and now is the time to correct those changes,” Mills said. “On the contrary, I think and fear that we may face an even greater decline.” Behavioral problems, school absences on the rise, federal data show Nevada’s Clark County School District, which serves 320,000 students, is one of several school systems taking a piecemeal approach to staffing shortages by trying several solutions at once. In hopes of shrinking the roughly 1,300 vacant teaching positions, the district raised teachers’ starting salaries by $7,000 and offers a $4,000 “relocation bonus” to new teachers who move out of state or more than 100 miles. In an interview, Superintendent Jesus F. Jara said the district also gives employees “retention bonuses” of up to $5,000 to stay on the job. But with school starting in a week, the district is still only 92 percent staffed, Jara said. And — despite the 24-hour efforts of his HR team — he doesn’t think the district will close the gap in 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 classes until Monday,” Jara said. On Aug. 8, the district will be forced to implement remedial measures, Jara said — including pulling administrators from the central office to work as substitutes and combining many classrooms together in large spaces such as auditoriums or gymnasiums. “As far as the bandage, I think they’re doing the best they can,” said Jeff Horn, executive director of the Clark County School Principals Association. “It’s a mess.” Other districts and states are attempting more unorthodox corrections. A new state law in Arizona, signed by Gov. Doug Ducey (R) last month, allows students to take teaching positions. A similar law, which took effect in Florida on July 1, offers K-12 teaching positions to military veterans who have served at least four years. Veterans do not need college degrees, 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. But Spar doesn’t think the veterans program is “really a solution,” as it can lead to unqualified people entering the ranks. “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 in Arizona’s Tucson Independent School District are considering making up for the math teacher shortage — the system is short 24 of them, along with 102 other teachers — by sending a small number of students to online learning in part of the day. The district may hire virtual math teachers from a Chicago-based online education company, the Tucson Sentinel reported. The supervisor did not respond to a request for comment. In both Mineral Wells Independent School District, Texas, and Chico Independent School District, officials switched to a four-day school week for the upcoming academic year. In both districts, which are small and rural, school administrators said the change is intended to attract and retain teachers amid significant staffing shortages, the Texas Tribune reported. Neither district responded to a request for comment. In the Madison, Wisconsin school district, Superintendent Jenkins said that, a month before school starts on Sept. 1, officials are still working to fill 199 teaching and 124 non-teaching vacancies. But no child will be without an adult in the classroom in the fall, he said, because the district was able to hire 269 qualified substitute teachers — mostly by raising substitute pay rates this spring. Jenkins said he hopes that, over the course of the year, the district can convince at least some of those substitutes to become full-time teachers. “We’re going to go after them,” Jenkins said. Initial enticements will include “some direct commissions. Every teacher loves their calendar, right? So we’re providing diaries, little things for them — and we’ve got some other things planned that I don’t want to reveal because I don’t want to spoil the surprise.” Schools are struggling to meet rising mental health needs, figures show 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 starts. Reid said the district of nearly 179,000 students is now making an “all hands on deck” effort to fill those jobs. “We’re really hiring and processing applications and hiring teachers around the clock,” he said. “It is our intention to continue to recruit and hire teachers daily as we approach the start of the school year.” However, the district has begun developing backup plans, Reid said. Although 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 it.” Leslie Houston, president of the Fairfax Education Association, said she’s never seen so many teachers walk off the job because they feel disrespected, mostly by politicians and some parents, in her career. “When people were bashing teachers and being really nasty about what we do and don’t do,” Houston said, “I don’t think…
