Fort Worth schools expanded recruiting to cope with the teacher shortage. Did it work?

Standing in the lobby of the Fort Worth Independent School District’s Teaching and Learning Center on Thursday morning, Raúl Peña watched as dozens of cars jockeyed for spaces in the building’s parking lot.

The district was hosting a back-to-school job fair, a last chance for principals and department directors to fill vacant teacher and staff positions before students return on Aug. 14. By the time the fair started, the parking lot was full, and attendees had begun parking at a shopping center across Bridgewood Drive.

The fair was the last of more than two dozen hiring events the district has either hosted or attended over the past year. More than 1,800 job-seekers registered in advance, making it the best-attended fair of the year. Peña, Fort Worth ISD’s chief talent officer, said the turnout was encouraging as the district looks to get fully staffed before the beginning of the school year.

“It’s been amazing,” he said.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, school districts nationwide have struggled to retain teachers and recruit enough candidates to replace the educators who leave. In response, many districts, including Fort Worth ISD, have adapted their recruiting strategies in hopes of attracting candidates they’ve never been able to reach before. Now, district officials say those efforts are beginning to pay off.

FWISD has fewer teacher vacancies at beginning of school year

Fort Worth ISD had 206 vacant teacher positions listed July 26, a 42% decline compared to the 352 vacancies the district had listed on the same date last year. After Thursday’s hiring event, Peña expected the district would have an average of about one unfilled teacher job per school.

In response to an ongoing shortage of teachers, Fort Worth ISD reworked its recruiting strategy, casting a broader net for candidates. Superintendent Angélica Ramsey said the district starts its recruiting process earlier in the year than it did in previous years. Where that process used to begin in the spring, it now begins the previous fall, she said. So as students and teachers are settling into the first semester, district recruiters are already at work finding teaching candidates for the next school year.

District leaders have also gotten creative on how to find teaching candidates, recruiting educators from overseas to work in high-need areas and working with their own employees who have college degrees but no teaching certificates to get them certified to teach.

A large amount of the district’s recruiting efforts still happen in the spring and summer, Ramsey said. Since the beginning of January, Fort Worth ISD’s recruiters have either hosted or attended more than two dozen hiring fairs, she said. And even after all that work, the district still has vacant teacher jobs, she said.

Like most school districts, Fort Worth ISD has struggled for years to find enough certified bilingual and special education teachers, she said, and this year is no exception. Both of those jobs require specialized training and certifications, so recruiting for those positions is always a challenge.

But over the past few years, the district has also struggled to find enough secondary English teachers, she said, an area that historically has been easier to fill. Ramsey said she suspects the lack of applicants for English teacher jobs is one outcome of the education system’s decades-long emphasis on STEM fields and deprioritization of the humanities.

Math and science teachers are always in high demand

At the beginning of Thursday’s hiring fair, Baldwin Brown, the principal at I.M. Terrell Academy for STEM and Visual & Performing Arts, was one math teacher shy of a full staff. Areas like math and science tend to be more specialized than others, Brown said. Candidates have to have a love for the subject matter, and also an interest in teaching it to high school students, he said. That means those positions are always harder to fill, he said.

Adding to that challenge is the fact that teachers are leaving the profession in larger numbers, Brown said. During the pandemic, people began exploring other options, he said, and some of them decided to leave the classroom to try something else. When teachers quit, it means principals and recruiters have to work even harder to find new teachers to replace them — including by going to hiring fairs like the one last week.

“We have to continue to do things like this to make sure we’re recruiting the best candidates to put in front of our students,” he said.

Across the room, Andrea Johnson, principal at Western Hills Primary School, was looking for “a candidate who is open to learning, who is excited about kids.” And, unlike last year, she was only looking for one of them.

Johnson said she was encouraged by the number of people who attended the job fair, and excited about the prospect of finding a new teacher for her students. The district is in the middle of implementing a new reading curriculum, so that person will need to be willing to learn and adapt to new teaching methods, she said. But the fact that she only had to find one new teacher instead of several, as she did last year, made the process easier, she said.

“To have only one opening is a blessing,” she said. “Because it’s tough out here, is what I’m hearing.”

New recruiting strategies show promise in HEB ISD

Cicely Tuttle, assistant superintendent of human resources for the Hurst-Euless-Bedford Independent School District, said the district had 18 open teacher positions on Thursday, which she said is comparable with where the district was at the same time last year. Before the pandemic, it was unusual for the district to start the year with any vacant teacher positions, she said, but it’s become more common over the past few years.

Like Fort Worth, HEB now starts its recruitment process earlier than it did in years past, Tuttle said. Officials took the district’s staffing plan to its school board for approval a month earlier this year, allowing them to begin hiring in March rather than in April, as they’ve historically done.

Starting the recruiting process earlier has a few advantages, Tuttle said. It gives the district a jump start, allowing it to compete with other districts that have typically started their hiring processes earlier, she said. It also opens the district up to candidates who start the job search earlier. Experienced teachers who are looking for a change typically don’t wait until spring break to start applying for jobs, she said, so districts that start their hiring processes later might miss out on those candidates because they’ve already been hired somewhere else.

The district also put together a committee of administrators to look over its recruitment efforts and see where it could improve, Tuttle said. Among other things, the district looked at which recruitment fairs seem to generate the largest number of applicants, especially in high-need areas like special education and bilingual education, she said. That information lets the district focus its efforts where they tend to pay off the most, she said. While it’s nearly impossible to gauge the effectiveness of any single strategy, Tuttle said, this is the first year in several that the district won’t have any vacant bilingual education teacher jobs on the first day of school.

FWISD tries to keep more teachers in the classroom

Ramsey, the Fort Worth ISD superintendent, said the district’s leaders have worked hard to keep its teachers from leaving the profession. The district offers a teacher residency program where students from the colleges of education at Tarleton State University and Texas Tech University spend a year working in a Fort Worth ISD classroom alongside an experienced educator. Many of those students end up staying in the district after they graduate, she said. The district also connects every first-year teacher with a mentor teacher, which Ramsey said is key to helping new educators feel successful, ultimately making them less likely to leave the profession.

It’s also likely that the end of online learning made it easier for teachers to stay in the classroom, Ramsey said. School shutdowns forced career educators to improvise in ways they’d never had to, leading to stress and burnout for many, if not most of them. But Ramsey said the situation also left many teachers feeling disconnected from their colleagues.

During listening tours, many teachers told Ramsey that they depended on a single other teacher for support during remote learning. But when school buildings reopened, teachers were able to reconnect to the broader support system in their schools, giving them more places to turn for advice, she said. Many teachers told her that extra support helped ease the sense that they were left to navigate a challenging situation on their own. It’s that feeling of isolation that drives many teachers from the profession, she said. So by ensuring that teachers feel supported, she hopes the district can keep more of them in the classroom.

But no matter how much support the district offers, every teacher will leave the classroom eventually. Some will take jobs in other districts. Others will change careers. Others will retire after teaching in the district for decades. So every year, the district will need to find new educators to replace them.

“We just want folks to love kids and to believe that every child can learn,” Ramsey said. “If they love children and they believe in them, we’ll teach them anything else that they need to know.”