How state Superintendent Ryan Walters says he's addressing Oklahoma's teacher shortage
The new school year elicits a wide range of emotions for students, parents and teachers. Whether it’s excitement or anxiety, eagerness or fear, I have felt the entire emotional spectrum in the first week as a student, teacher and parent. Especially for teachers, this can be an overwhelming time as they prepare classrooms and lesson plans for the year ahead.
As teachers return back to school to get ready for the year ahead, Oklahoma is still facing a teacher shortage that will provide a burden on students, teachers and schools as a whole. We have begun to make important strides to address this crisis, and I wanted to highlight some of those initiatives, and paint a road map for the future, to ensure that future first weeks of school don’t face this issue.
Firstly, I wanted to highlight the teacher pay raises the Legislature passed this session. Our teachers are often overworked and underpaid for the work they put in. While we have passed teacher pay raises before, they have been too far and few between to be a consistent answer to the teacher shortage. Teacher pay raises can be a great one-year fix, but as the years go by, other states just raise their teacher salaries, and Oklahoma ends up right back at Square One. I am thankful for the work the Legislature put in this session to secure these raises, but we can’t just check a box and put it on the back burner for another five years. We must continue to find ways to ensure teachers are properly incentivized to stay in Oklahoma public schools.
One of the new initiatives we’ve launched at the Oklahoma State Department of Education is the Teacher Empowerment Program. The Teacher Empowerment Program will allow the state Education Department to match up to $40,000 for salary increases for teachers designated as advanced, lead or master teachers. This will provide a financially competitive pathway for our best teachers to stay in the classroom. For a great school system, we need great people in administration and in the classroom, and it is our hope that this program provides further incentive for great teachers to stay in the classroom.
Finally, we were able to allocate $16 million for a brand-new Teacher Signing Bonus Program. This program provided signing bonuses up to $50,000 to certified teachers in either early elementary education or in pre-K through 12th special education who did not teach in an Oklahoma public school last year, with escalating bonus amounts if they chose to teach in a rural school or in schools with a significant portion of economically disadvantaged students. While we wait on the final confirmation in September, the preliminary reports have shown this program to be wildly successful far beyond what we expected, with nearly 800 teachers applying. This inaugural year proved it to be one of the many long-term solutions needed to address the teacher shortage, and I urge the Legislature to provide permanent funding for this program in next year’s legislative session.
Whether it's through addressing the teacher shortage, providing the best instructional material available, or the countless other ways we can support teachers, Oklahoma should lead the nation in supporting our teachers. Our teachers need to feel respected, valued and cared for, and my administration will continue to do everything it can to ensure that happens. The teacher shortage is a challenge we will continue to address head-on and commit resources to addressing. Teachers, I thank you for the work you do, and I look forward to seeing the impact that you have on students in the year ahead.
Ryan Walters is the state schools superintendent for Oklahoma.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Ryan Walters: Oklahoma should lead nation in supporting our teachers
