Baltimore City anticipates extra teachers

Schools are usually searching in the final days of summer break to fill their last vacant teaching positions. This year, every county in the Baltimore area is again in that position.

Baltimore City, however, has a glut of teachers.

Schools chief Andres Alonso reorganized his central office on North Avenue, moving about 300 employees back into schools to cut costs and plug a $50 million budget gap. The result, combined with an aggressive recruiting campaign, is 141 extra teachers.

“We hired fewer teachers, based on the knowledge that the pool would expand,” Alonso said. “But there was no way to predict that so many fewer people would remain rather than choose to retire.”

Officials expected more employees to retire during the reorganization. There were 280.5 employees reassigned in the process; 15 retired, four resigned and 11.5 were fired, said JoAnne Koehler, the school system’s chief human resource officer.

“It’s safe to say, traditionally, there’s a shortage in some areas, but this year we have a surplus in some areas,” Koehler said.

About 200 teachers resigned or retired last year between the start of the school year and January, Koehler said, so the surplus is going to fill the spots she expects to be vacated in that time this year.

“We will not scramble this year as we have in the past” to fill those positions, Alonso said.

The extra teachers will force the school system to dip into a reserve fund of money, Koehler said. The amount might be minimal because of the teachers leaving in the first half of the school year.

“It’s going to have a bite in the beginning, but every morning when I come in, there are resignation letters on my desk,” she said.

Until all the teachers are assigned their own classes, schools that are struggling academically will get two teachers in some classes. Most of the extra teachers are certified in science and math, areas that often experience teacher shortages.

In Howard County, the school system is down to only 10 teacher vacancies for elementary and specialized areas, such as English for Speakers of Other Languages. Spokeswoman Patti Caplan said the system still faces the “same challenges as all school systems in the critical shortage areas such as secondary mathematics, science, technology, family and consumer sciences, foreign languages and special education.”

Despite the surplus of city teachers overall, the elementary schools don’t have enough teachers. Only teachers certified for elementary schools can teach in them. At the end of last week, 30 vacancies remained in city elementary and prekindergarten classes, and long-term substitutes were planned to fill in until full-time teachers could be hired.

There are also five schools that could start the year without a principal. Officials expect those positions to be filled by Sept. 9.