PHOENIX — Arizona schools started this year with more vacancies than last year as more teachers chose to leave the classroom.
A new report Thursday by the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association showed the 150 school districts and charter schools that responded to this year’s survey found themselves with nearly 6,950 positions to be filled. That compares with fewer than 6,230 last year.
The good news, if you will, is that by four weeks into the school year just one out of every five of those vacancies remained to be filled. Last year at this time the number was one in four. But Justin Wing, past president of the association who put the report together, said that doesn’t mean schools were able to find more certified teachers.
He said districts have made up much of the difference by putting people who do not meet standard teaching requirements in front of classrooms. That includes those who are in a teacher intern program and those who have emergency teaching certificates, people who lack any actual training in how to teach but have some professional background in the subject like math or physics.
Other slots were filled by those whose certification has not yet been approved, with the reporting schools saying they had hired 314 people from other countries through professional visas that allow them to work here.
Yet even with all that, schools still reported they still have 1,444 positions where there are just no teachers.
The largest share of these vacancies are currently being “filled” with long-term substitutes.
But schools also have gotten creative, forcing existing teachers to take on additional classes, putting more children into classes than districts determine is suitable, and creating multi-grade classrooms.
Complicating the problem, according to the report, is that 283 teachers who schools were counting on already have resigned this year, with another 81 who didn’t report to work on the first day of school. Also, 63 teachers simply abandoned their jobs.
The number of positions schools needed to fill actually fell between the beginning of the 2017 school year and 2018.
Wing credited that to the 10% salary boost enacted by the Legislature in the wake of the #RedforEd movement and the teacher strike.
“One of the things that it did is it retained teachers for a few more years than it normally would have,” he said.
Wing said he saw that in the Washington Elementary School District in the Phoenix area where he works.
“I had teachers in May (2018) when #RedforEd occurred rescind their retirement because this was the biggest raise they ever received in their career,” he said.
More to the point, Wing said, is that staying on an extra year with a 10% higher salary directly increased their retirement benefits which are based on the highest paid 36 consecutive months of their past 10 years of work history.
But many of those people delayed their retirement for just one year to get that pension boost.
The result was that bump this year in positions that need to be filled.
The other half of the problem, said Wing, is that universities in Arizona are just not producing the number of graduates that they once did.
