How Salina schools are coping with the teacher shortage and what's happening across Kansas
Salina area schools started their first week of classes, and while all districts say they are confident about the year ahead, some are still in the process of hiring faculty and staff.
As reported across the state, and in pockets nationwide, there have been fewer applicants to schools for teaching positions. It’s an issue that reflects a greater gap in the overall labor market, which was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Salina, though, is in a unique position where its schools are not in dire need of staff, like other parts of the state. But their comfortability now comes from quick action in the early stages of the hiring process – which usually begins in March and into early summer – in the form of hiring and recruiting incentives.
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Salina Public Schools
Beginning this school year, there are no classroom teaching positions open for Salina Public Schools; the district was able to fill all those positions with an influx of new hires prior to its first day of classes.
Even so, Eryn Wright, executive director of human resources and legal services for Salina Public Schools said the hiring process was far more difficult this year.
“It’s significant, you know, since COVID,” Wright said. “We’ve seen a decline in special education (applicants), particularly.”
Following that trend are lower application numbers for positions like speech language pathologists and intervention services. Across the district’s eight elementary schools, two middle schools and two high schools, there are at least one to two openings in each building for these kinds of staff – those who aren’t traditional classroom teachers.
It’s typical, Wright said, for science and math positions to have lower applicants, but it is unusual for that to be the case with roles in elementary education.
“It’s become more and more difficult over time, where we are seeing fewer people in the application pool,” Wright said.
For USD 305, the issue is a two-sided coin with the face being less applicants and the tail being some of the highest rates of teacher resignation in quite some time.
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Over the last six years, the district averaged 72 new teachers. Three years ago, the number was down in the 50’s, but this year it is more than 100. The numbers tend to fluctuate, Wright said, but the new hire rate ahead of 2022-23 is significantly higher than any other she has seen for the district.
Salina Public Schools have utilized Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief to provide hiring incentives for the upcoming school year:
$1,500 for each employee who works the full 2022-23 school year
$250 for each substitute teacher who works 200 hours or more each semester
The district also used ESSER funds to pay for substitute license reimbursement and implemented a “refer a friend” program, which offers monetary incentive if a current employee refers someone who accepts employment with Salina Public Schools.
Some positions in the district are filled by certified long-term substitutes.
“We created a position – director of recruitment and retention – in hopes to build relationships with and recognize talents we already have,” Wright said. “That’s been our focus – building relationships with people and supporting teacher progress.”
Starting salary for a teacher at USD 305 is $42,000, and the average teacher salary is about $52,000.
Southeast of Saline
Southeast of Saline has also been able to fill all its teaching positions prior to the start of the school year. Superintendent Roger Stumpf said he felt fortunate to do so, despite a dramatic drop in applicants.
“It used to be we’d get 15-20, even as high as 30 applicants for a teaching job,” Stumpf said. “Now we’re lucky to get 2-3.”
Southeast of Saline also faces a unique problem that larger districts like USD 305 avoid due to their size. When SES loses one history teacher, it loses half its department.
“The smaller the school, the more important it is,” Stumpf said. “If we don’t, for us, it’s going to be a crisis situation if we can’t fill a spot.” .
Starting teacher pay at Southeast of Saline is $40,300 and average teacher pay is $56,555. Like most other districts in the state, SES also provided retention incentives to its staff with ESSER funds. The district did not provide detailed information on incentive amounts.
The shortage of applicants is something Stumpf dealt with before the pandemic, when he worked in western Kansas in more rural districts.
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“So many teachers want to be in a larger place that has more accommodations and amenities,” Stumpf said. “Where I was before, it was an hour to the closest Walmart. … so, it’s not just about finding a job but finding a job and a place you want to live.”
Stumpf said he feels good about being in Saline County, where before this year, it has been easier to bring in teachers than in more rural communities.
Ell-Saline
Ell-Saline has come up with a similar plan to Salina and Southeast of Saline to incentivize teacher hiring and retention.
Ten years ago, the district would see anywhere from 20-50 applications for a teacher position that opened in April or May. Now, it gets around five applications for a position that opens in February or March.
For positions that open in mid-April or later, the district is lucky to get one applicant.
Superintendent Brian Rowley said there is one elementary teaching position and one high school business position that remain vacant.
Ell-Saline has filled three other positions with certified long-term substitute teachers.
Starting pay for teachers in the district is $38,535, and the average teacher pay is $52,000. For the 2022-23 school year, the district is offering a $1,000 hiring incentive to all new employees.
“The shortage of teachers makes it difficult to hire after March, but we have put together an outstanding staff,” Stumpf said.
What is causing the teacher shortage?
High levels of burnout and stress are leading to a dwindling pool of candidates to fill positions that do open up, and researchers worry the effects of continued attacks on the profession could snowball into few people becoming teachers in the first place.
A Kansas Department of Education Teacher Vacancy and Supply Committee report from the spring showed that across the state, there were a little under 1,400 teacher vacancies in March 2022. A few months after the report, state education commissioner Randy Watson cautioned that Kansas schools could be bracing for "an educator shortage that may be the worst we have seen" in Kansas.
However, one limitation of that data is the department includes positions that are filled, but not with a teacher holding the appropriate license — think a math teacher hired for an English position.
Another is that staffing numbers generally change significantly over the summer as districts make new hires and also see departures, which wouldn’t be reflected in a spring collection of data.
Both of those reasons make it hard to use that data to pinpoint exactly the extent of any teacher staffing issues, particularly on a statewide basis, said Tuan Nguyen, a Kansas State University professor who studies education labor.
Nguyen is the lead author on a working paper that is among the first to examine teacher shortages at a national level. It's a difficult task, given there are no standards for how state education departments around the country report teacher vacancies.
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With millions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief funds, many districts also created positions that were filled by existing instructional staff, although the exact effect of those new positions on teacher vacancies isn't yet fully understood, Nguyen said.
While some districts across Kansas are seeing teacher staffing shortfalls and others have to find unique ways to staff their classrooms, some are reporting relatively normal staffing and hiring conditions. But even with adequate staffing, dwindling substitute teacher pools put a strain on schools whenever teachers do need to miss school.
Why the teacher shortage discussion itself matters
Using statistics from most state's education departments and news reports, Nguyen and his co-researchers' working paper counts that there are at least 36,000 teacher vacancies around the country. The researchers note this is likely an undercount, since data for some states predates the pandemic, and some states like California may be filling positions with substitutes or teachers with emergency certifications.
But the data also indicates some significant differences in some states, particularly in the South, where a deluge of state laws on education have undermined the prestige of teaching as a respectable profession, Nguyen said.
"It's no longer seen as highly in society," Nguyen said. "It's seen as a semi-profession. We have states that are forcing teachers' hands and dictating what they can or can't teach."
In Kansas, a survey of 20,000 teachers found that one in six felt likely to leave public education before reaching retirement age, and half of all respondents felt disengaged with their work.
But Nguyen cautions against reading too much into that type of data, since intentions don't always line up with actions when it comes to job satisfaction and attrition rates. A separate national study by researchers at the RAND Corporation found that while more teachers and principals in January 2022 indicated they were likely to leave at the end of the 2021-22 school year, data suggests that not many of them actually did.
That's not to discount teacher feelings of stress and burnout, Nguyen said. He suspects that the perception of a teacher shortage crisis, while not yet backed up by nationwide data, is itself driven in part by a gloomy outlook among educators and the general public's approach to the profession.
For its part, the Kansas State Board of Education in July convened a special working group, made up of representatives from the boards' Teacher Vacancy and Supply Committee and the Professional Standards Board, to develop long-term ideas to shore up Kansas schools' staffing.
There's more nuance to the conversation surrounding school staffing and teacher shortages, Nguyen said, but stakeholders should keep in mind the people behind those numbers.
"When a national survey shows that 55% of teachers are thinking of leaving the profession, even if they don't end up doing so, that still indicates a high level of stress and burnout, and that's something we should all care about," he said.
This article originally appeared on Salina Journal: Here's how Salina schools are evading the teacher shortage problem
