Teacher hiring around the country is coming up very short this year. Just today we hear about the following teacher shortages from around the nation:
- South Dakota -in spite of $63 million in salary increases, to move starting salaries from $33K to $40K – they still had 186 openings compared to 215 last year
- Kansas – college of ed enrollment down 2300 in just 3 years experiencing years of continued teacher shortages – but only in the “task force” phase of actually doing something
- Clark County NV – doing much better than last year with only 358 teacher vacancies now compared to 825 last year due to big teacher raises ($34K to $40.9K) and bonuses for teaching in high needs schools
- Indiana – Superintendent Ritz is trying to solve the shortage through PR and Grow Your Own programs – outlines legislative push to solve the problem next year.
- Colorado – teacher shortage to get worse before it gets better producing only 1976 new teachers to fill 3456 vacancies. And note that some teachers produced never go into teaching
- California – non-profits are filling the void to recruit teachers as education school enrollment has dropped 70% in ten years
Wow – that is one day’s worth of articles on the difficulty in hiring teachers today. It is not getting any better.