There are just more than 260,000 students in Broward County, Florida, and about 1,300 public school jobs available there as the 2023-2024 school year approaches. The School District of Philadelphia, with less than half that number of students, has almost as many vacancies. Metro Nashville Public Schools, with about 86,000 students, has 900 open school jobs.
Broward County is recruiting teachers, bus drivers, counselors, custodians and many of the other K12 positions that have been hit by shortages. Principals and other staff are hiring candidates on-the-spot at the district’s summer job fairs. In Philadelphia, more than 300 candidates attended the district’s first job fair earlier this summer, which was geared toward teacher and support staff positions.
Philadelphia administrators hope to hire about 300 new teachers before the first day of school, WHYY reported. “We are set up to be able to get them to apply, to complete their testing, complete interviewing, get them on the path so they can start getting processed for hiring,” Terri Rita, Philadelphia’s deputy chief of talent, told WHYY. The district has about 95% of the teaching staff it needs, 95% of the secretaries and 96% of the cleaners, Rita added.
Metro Nashville Public Schools still needs around 400 teachers for the first day of school, with the biggest shortages in special education, English learners, math and science, News Channel 5 reports. The district recently saw record attendance at one of its job fairs, with some candidates “coming from as far away as New York,” Brigitte Tubbs-Jones, Metro Nashville’s director of talent acquisition, told the station.
Favorable school jobs forecast?
As superintendents and their teams know all too well, the pandemic only worsened K12’s labor shortages, from classrooms to cafeterias to central office. “A year ago I told my team, ‘It’s scary to think about what staffing is going to look like a year from now,” Matthew Gutierrez, superintendent of Seguin ISD in Texas told District Administration. “It’s even scarier to think about what staffing is going to look like a year from now.”
But there are signs of hope this summer. The first day of school at Tuloso Midway ISD near Corpus Christi, Texas, was Monday and leaders there told KIIItv.com that “this year has been the best hiring season since the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Tuloso Midway ISD has hired about 35 new staff members, most of whom were teachers. The district was able to staff “specific programs” and also ensure it had enough teachers for the new school year, Assistant Superintendent for Instructional John White told KIIItv.com. “Nothing like what we’ve experienced in the years past where it definitely felt like it was just a never-ending cycle of trying to find, find that last remaining person that we needed,” White said.
Education officials in Kansas are looking on the bright side of the state’s record number of open teaching positions. This spring’s 1,634 vacancies are indeed the highest ever but—after a few years of sharp increases in shortages—aren’t much higher than fall 2022’s 1,628 vacancies, the Topeka Capital-Journal points out.
“I’m going to choose to be positive about this because this has really been the first time that we’ve kind of balanced,” Shane Carter, director of the state’s licensure division, said, according to the Capital-Journal. “We didn’t have a huge increase, so I hope this indicates that we’ve reached our ceiling for vacancies.”
Still, half of the state’s vacancies represent positions that administrators filled with candidates who aren’t fully qualified for the classroom, the Capital-Journal explains.
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