A pair of stories out of Kentucky and Indiana indicate that the national teacher shortage will be plaguing classrooms as schools prepare to head back into session.
I’ve written about this numerous times - from the high number of retirements and resignations during the COVID pandemic - to the lack of students pursuing teaching credentials in colleges across the country.
Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville - Kentucky’s largest school district - is attempting to address an unprecedented shortage of teachers to fill available vacancies as the start of school is just over a week away.
WDRB reports:
The Jefferson County Board of Education is scheduled to hear an update on the "unprecedented number of classroom teacher vacancies" during Tuesday's meeting, according to the agenda.
JCPS has 328 open teaching positions, according to the district's employment website.
The district’s head of human resources, Aimee Green-Webb, notes this problem has been coming for at least five years:
“We saw this train coming starting five years ago,” Green-Webb said. “We have fewer people entering programs, and at the time they would have started graduating last year and this year, the pool is so much smaller. It’s a nationwide challenge, and we’re all competing for that same small pool.”
Meanwhile, the head of the district’s teachers’ union explains what the shortage means in practice:
“Our folks are concerned because if we are short teachers, we’re having to cover for one another, and people lost their planning periods and they can’t plan and grade quality lessons like they would like to, and that actually accelerates teacher burnout,” McKim said. “It can become a vicious circle, and we want to avoid having that happen.”
Meanwhile, a story out of Indiana highlights similar concerns. There are more than 3000 vacancies across the state as schools are on the verge of opening for the 2022-23 year.
The President of the Indiana State Teachers Association (ISTA) says issues including pay and support for the teaching profession have created the crisis:
"What is the state going to do to make sure this is a profession that Hoosiers want to go into?" he said. "Clearly, we're going to have to make more resources available for school districts to devote to salary and to wage-related benefits in order to make sure folks recognize that they can earn a living by going into this profession."
ISTA’s President, Keith Gambill, added that instead of constant negativity, teachers and schools need positivity and support:
"They're going to have to uplift the great work that our educators are doing. Our teachers, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, all of the great work they're doing instead of us having the constant drum beat of everything that's going wrong in our schools.”
That last piece reminds of a note from Nashville education blogger TC Weber:
Most of the focus for attrition has been placed on salaries, and while wages have been chronically low for all too long, it ain’t all about money. Look at it this way, if I’m paying you $100 dollars a day to repeatedly beat you with a baseball bat, you are going to tire of it quickly. So then when you are about ready to quit, I raise the rate to $1000. You look at the money and try to convince yourself that for that kind of money you could handle getting beat with a bat all day. But, after a little while, it’ll start to sink in, you don’t want to get hit with a bat for any amount of money. That’s where we live with teachers.
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