Scrambling for Staff: The Teacher Shortage in Rural Schools

 

When Reid Riedlinger advertises for staff, he offers them subsidized housing, laptop computers, eight computers and a copy machine for each classroom, and a full-time teaching assistant! Riedlinger, superintendent of schools in the two-building Wellpinit School District, which serves 402 K-12 children on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington, also offers classes that average just 17 students. Plus, he told Education World, he throws in free breakfast and lunch if teachers eat it with students, and he promises no staff meetings longer than 30 minutes. To try to staff the state's schools, Alaska initiated the Rural Education Partnership Program, a one-year program that helps Alaska natives and others already living in rural districts obtain teaching certificates. The educators work with the local school district, community, and university while earning their credentials. Currently, about 60 percent of those enrolled are Alaska natives, director of Alaska teacher placement Mary Ellen LaBerge told Education World.

With an aging teaching force, mandated class size reductions, and the swelling numbers of immigrants and baby boomer children, U.S. schools will need an unprecedented number of new teachers over the next decade. Between 2 million and 2.5 million -- an average of more than 200,000 annually -- new teachers will be needed, according to the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF). It is assumed that about half of those teachers will come from a pool of people newly prepared for the profession, and the rest will be returnees from the reserve pool of teachers.
However, those who left teaching may not be that likely to return. In many cases, they view their current salaries, working conditions, and opportunities for advancement much more favorably than do those who stayed in teaching. And as for the teachers currently being prepared to teach, in a series of reports written for the NCTAF Stanford University professor Linda Darling-Hammond found the following:

• After they graduate, only about 60 percent of students trained as teachers actually enter the profession.
• Thirty percent of the traditionally trained teachers, 10 to 15 percent of teachers prepared in five-year teacher preparation programs, and 60 percent of those prepared in truncated alternative programs leave the profession by their third year.
• Of those who enter the profession, most teachers in public schools are non-Hispanic Caucasian females; the proportion of minority teachers is far less than the proportion of minority students.
• More than 25 percent of those hired each year are not fully prepared and licensed for their jobs, and those teachers are assigned primarily to the most educationally vulnerable children.
• Even if new teachers have certification, they are frequently not certified in areas of greatest need, such as math, science, and special education.

In addition, Hammond found, teachers are hesitant to move from where they are to rural or remote regions where they may be most needed.

RURAL PENNSYLVANIA

Though some believe the current supply of teachers is inadequate, "national figures seem to indicate that there are enough teachers to go around," Timothy Collins, director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Rural Education and Small Schools and coordinator of a recent symposium for the National Rural Education Association told Education World. The problem he perceives is one of subject shortages and geographic distribution. Once a teacher has years in a system, he or she may be reluctant to move to a rural or remote region, starting over again on the bottom rung of a salary scale that is not adjusted for past experience. "That 20-year teacher has really locked himself or herself into a job by the time [the teacher has] stayed at [a] district for four or five years," executive director Joe Bard of the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools told Education World. "The people teaching should have broad exposure to and knowledge of the world. Instead you get folks who teach within 25 miles of where they went to high school and college.
"A district that can put $14,000 behind each child can attract different teachers than a district that can put $6,000 behind each child," added Bard.
Several years ago, Pennsylvania offered a program of forgiveness of student loans for teachers who took jobs in rural or urban districts. "That program has sadly fallen by the wayside," said Bard.

THE SITUATION IS CRITICAL IN ALASKA

Like those in Pennsylvania, Alaska's "Anchorage and Matanuska-Susitna school districts hurt themselves a few years ago when they stopped giving new hires monetary credit for their years of experience," Alaska's teacher placement director Mary Ellen LaBerge told Education World. "Unless you are in a specialty area, teachers coming into the systems come in at entry level." Not recognizing past experience, not providing inducements to relocate, and paying a flat salary certainly do not help a rural or remote area's teacher recruitment, said LaBerge. In October of the current school year, there were 84 teaching vacancies in Alaska. About half of those were in the Anchorage area, and more than a third of the vacancies were in special education, John Holst, superintendent of the Sitka (Alaska) School District told Education World.
"We are experiencing extreme shortages in special education," said Holst. "Recent changes in the federal laws guiding special education programs have made it much more difficult to be in simple compliance with student discipline, meeting paperwork requirements, and dealing with providing for the needs of what appears to be a growing population of students who qualify for special services."
"We have many teachers in our regular classrooms who previously taught special education and even have maintained their certification," Holst added. " Most of them would quit or move elsewhere if they were required to do special education. We do not have the ability to differentiate pay for such positions as special education."
In addition to the 84 teaching vacancies, "we have 42 teachers on waivers right now," added LaBerge. "That means special education teachers who haven't finished their degrees are in the classroom as full-time teachers. Districts are becoming very creative -- using aides and paraprofessionals for teachers."
In addition, noted LaBerge, many of the rural districts are forced to use teachers endorsed in one area to teach classes in other areas. "This in turn causes retention problems," she told Education World. "Teachers required to teach out of their endorsement area reach stress levels much faster and become discouraged and/or overwhelmed much easier. Morale can be low, and turnover is much greater in districts that have to resort to this."
One other trend that LaBerge has noticed is that teachers seem to be "jumping" contracts. "We have had more teachers walk out on contracts this year than ever before," she said. "Signing bonuses -- generally, we don't have them."

BONUSES AND CREDITS DON'T ALWAYS HELP

Although most Alaskan schools do not offer signing bonuses or adjust pay to reflect a teacher's past experience, even rural schools that do are having trouble finding and retaining quality teachers. "Several schools [in Nebraska] offered signing bonuses, and almost all schools are now allowing unlimited years of experience to new teachers," Matt Fisher, principal of Chase County High School (Imperial, Nebraska), told Education World. Yet "here in rural Nebraska we are definitely seeing a shortage of qualified teachers."