Dive Brief:
- In districts facing severe teacher shortages, officials are scrambling to find a fix, drawing in teachers with everything from hiring bonuses to public relations campaigns.
- Rural districts in particular are struggling to attract candidates, but even large districts like Nevada's Clark County, which contains Las Vegas, have had to put extra effort into attracting teachers.
- Clark County, for example, launched a nationwide push to attract teachers with $5,000 hiring bonuses for both new and retired educators.
Dive Insight:
Teacher shortages are unevenly distributed across the country. New York, for example, actually has a surplus of certified teachers. But districts have uneven hiring power, with many of the districts facing shortages offering low pay and potentially challenging working conditions. For example, Kansas, which still had hundreds of open positions earlier this week, offers the lowest teacher salaries in the country and has struggled with high-profile education funding and policy controversies. Compare that to Clark County’s financial lure, which helped district administrators recruit more than half of the extra teachers needed.
A study released earlier this year found that higher first year salaries can help keep teachers around, but they can also lower the number of teachers a district can hire. A district’s ability to use money as an incentive is also limited by funding, which has prompted calls for financial boosts.
Pay disparities follow regional patterns, as well. Particularly in rural areas, where lower costs of living can make salaries seem smaller to outside applicants, district administrators struggle to attract highly qualified candidates. In states with large swaths of sparsely inhabited land, that has prompted moves to lower licensing requirements so that rural administrators can hire local experts without teaching expertise and train them.