Schools across America are feeling the squeeze amid a national teacher shortage that is forcing some districts to downsize to a four-day week.
Administrators from Texas to California have been beefing up their recruitment efforts to stay attractive to new hires by offering signing bonuses, holding multiple job fairs, targeting retirees, and even turning to uncertified candidates to fill the teacher gaps.
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The options are limited in rural areas that can’t afford to compete with larger school districts that offer big bumps in pay or bonuses. Instead, they are forced to think outside the box and come up with ways not only to attract new teachers but also to retain staff members who are being actively headhunted by neighboring districts.
At the Mineral Wells Independent School District, a four-day week was one of the only options it had.
Located about 50 miles west of Fort Worth, Texas, the district started to spiral in April when it lost a beloved educator who had been there for decades. Less than a month later, the district lost six more teachers who left for jobs in districts that operated on a four-day schedule, the Texas Tribune reported.
“We started losing teachers to that four-day school week, regardless of what we paid,” said David Tarver, Mineral Wells Independent School District’s assistant superintendent. “That was a big eye-opener.”
The school board knew it was on the brink of a crisis and decided to act. On May 17, it voted to switch to a four-day week, which went into effect this school year.
The decision was a lifeline for a district that could not afford to offer dramatic pay increases like some of the bigger districts. For example, the Mineral Wells base pay for teachers is $45,000. The base pay for a Houston Independent School District teacher is $61,500.
Other rural districts across the state, including Athens, Jasper, Devers, and Chico, have made the switch to four-day school weeks to remain competitive.
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Several states are struggling to fill open teaching spots.
In Nevada, 3,000 jobs remained unfilled across the state’s 17 school districts just days before students were set to return, the Nevada State Education Association estimated.
“We don’t have teachers for the classrooms,” said Dawn Etcheverry, president of the NSEA.
Staffing shortages forced some schools there to make tough decisions, which often translated to increasing class sizes. The “temporary” fixes are just that, temporary, and are likely to hinder students’ ability to learn, Etcheverry said.
“It’s hard to spend time one-on-one teaching a child how to do a fingering on a recorder when you’ve got 40 sitting in your classroom,” said Etcheverry, who is a music teacher. “Or let’s talk about a geometry teacher in a high school who now has 48 kids and they’re trying to read all the proofs.”
In Virginia, news of teacher shortages has dominated school board meetings as districts scrambled to find, with various degrees of success, people willing to teach.
Spotsylvania County Superintendent Kelly Guempel described the staffing needs as “severe” and had 114 vacant teaching jobs open less than a week before the start of the school year. Fairfax County Superintendent Michelle Reid told concerned parents over the summer that the district was “working hard” to overcome a shortage that left about 3% of classrooms unstaffed just days before students were due back.
“We are working hard to continue to fill those remaining vacancies and to ensure that we will have a licensed educator in every classroom,” Reid wrote.
In southern Florida, some school districts are filling staffing holes by temporarily certifying veterans to teach. The new recruitment plan allows former military veterans who have not received bachelor’s degrees to receive five-year temporary certificates to teach kindergarten through 12th grade.
Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, said that while the need for teachers is dire, he does not believe the veteran program is “really a solution.”
“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 does not mean you will be a great teacher.”
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As more teachers exit the profession altogether due to COVID-19 and low wages, the flow of new teachers through the pipeline has slowed and is causing concern.
Between 2008 and 2019, the number of students completing traditional teacher education programs in the United States dropped by more than a third, according to a 2022 report by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.
