Education revolves around teachers and their carefully-curated lesson plans. In fact, teaching is one of the most important careers in the United States (US). Since 2021, there has been a shortage of teachers. Now this same educator shortage has district administrators scrambling to figure things out.
Due to The COVID-19 Pandemic, as well as teachers’ retirement choices and increasing stress, there has been a lack of available teachers.
“There is a disproportionate amount of teachers available to teach versus how many are leaving due to retirement or just career change,” Dr. Lisa Baker, principal of Communications Arts High School said, “So there’s an imbalance.”
The unfulfilled teaching positions are leaving their mark in Texas.
The Texas-American Federation of Teachers counted that nearly 43,000 teachers have left the education system in the last year. Additionally, nearly 66% of current teachers have considered leaving the profession.
“Every year, it’s the average that 30,000 teachers get out of the profession because of retirement or job changes,” said Baker, “It rose to around 50,000 in Texas.”
Northside Independent School District (NISD) is especially affected by the shortage of educators.
“We’ve got about 100 vacancies across the district right now,” Scott Mckenzie, Director of Recruitment and Retention said.
Although there are a multitude of reasons for these unfulfilled positions , a significant issue is that too many teachers are retiring early, deciding to end their career years before planned.
This rapid depletion in educators is not solely due to early retirement; it can also be attributed to a lesser influx from colleges and universities.
“I think that not enough people are being either selected, or encouraged, or personally want to go into teaching and so that creates a deficit,” Baker said. “And then there has been an influx of people leaving and teachers have different choices about retirement like you can go out early, you can go out midway or you can stay a little bit extra.”
Every career has its negative stereotypes but teaching has more than others and it is beginning to show an impact.
“We’ve been working with the colleges to try to showcase the positive aspects of teaching because all you see in the news is all the negative. So really image control and going through that,” Mckenzie said.
“There’s a myriad of reasons why people quit education,” Baker said “Like it’s not as a respected profession as it once was here in America, and currently in other countries”
The respect for teachers may be lessening, but the need for them has only been increasing.
“Teachers are the most important people to hire on campus and so it puts us in quite the predicament because we want to hire the best and brightest,” Baker said. “… So you really have to sell your school and your programs so that candidates hopefully will pick your school because now they have the choice.”
Both campuses, William Taft High School and Communications Arts High School have been affected by the shortage. Due to the immense number of students, Taft’s health teacher has been reassigned to the math department. This sudden change has also led our own Arts and Entertainment teacher to start teaching health in addition to the other four subjects she has been allocated (Senior Seminar, Mythology, Science Fiction, and Film Studies).
“It puts such a toll on teachers when we’re [admin] trying to take stuff off of their plate. To make it a more suitable, enjoyable work environment,” Baker said. “This shortage has just made us pile more and more on teachers.”
Despite the challenges and difficulties of being a teacher, their impact continues to change lives
“Teachers develop the kids. Kids spend more time at school than they do at home during their school years. And those teachers are the main contact and the main interaction with those kids and teach them more than just what’s in the books or more than the curriculum, good role models teach them how to be good citizens,” Mckenzie said. “But that classroom teacher being a good role model really, really shapes and develops the future of the kids.”