By Lauren Lumpkin, Karina Elwood and Nicole AsburyUpdated August 9, 2023 at 1:54 p.m. EDT|Published August 9, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Dorothy Clowers arrived early at Dr. Henry A. Wise Jr. High School on a recent afternoon so that she could secure a good spot at the front of the gym. Around her, dozens of other elementary school administrators would also vie for recruits, hoping to fill about 1,500 teacher and 479 staff vacancies before the first day of school.F
Clowers, the principal of William Paca Elementary in Prince George’s County, Md., eagerly held on to a sign bearing her school’s name as prospective teachers walked by. She wanted them to know that her school was ready to hire a kindergarten teacher, two fourth-grade teachers and a part-time fifth-grade teacher, among other positions.
“Generally speaking, I don’t have to come to these looking for teachers. But when you have staff retiring, and you don’t have a plethora of candidates coming out of college, this summer has been different,” said Clowers, who has been to two other hiring fairs — or “paloozas” — hosted by the school district this year. “But we do have a few more weeks, and we have another palooza. And I’m hopeful that we will get the candidates that we need so that we will be fully staffed when students arrive at school.”
Clowers isn’t alone. Elsewhere in the D.C. region, other schools are trying to fill at least 800 teaching vacancies before students return to classrooms this month. The scramble comes after another year of climbing teacher resignations locally and across the country. While teachers nationwide reported that their well-being was better in January than in 2021 and 2022, 23 percent said they were likely to leave their jobs by the end of the 2022-2023 school year — citing factors including pay, stress and disappointment, according to a survey from the Rand Corp.
In most D.C.-area districts, more teachers resigned during the 2022-2023 school year than in the term prior, data shows. Alexandria saw 325 teachers leave last year, compared with 212 in 2021-2022. More than 500 teachers left Loudoun County Public Schools last year, up from 339 in the school year prior. In Prince George’s County, officials counted 1,126 resignations between July 2022 and this July — the district last year reported losing 989 teachers between June 2021 and July 2022.
D.C.-area schools see spike in teacher resignations
In Maryland’s largest school system — Montgomery County Public Schools — 625 teachers have resigned since the start of the 2022-2023school year, which is about 2.4 percent of the total workforce. In 2021-2022, 576 teachers resigned their positions, TheWashington Post previously reported.
“This is the problem that we run into each year, that we have vacancies that do not get filled and then we end up with classes that have to be combined,” said Jennifer Martin, president of the Montgomery County Education Association, the county’s teacher’s union. School district officials estimate that there are about 397 teacher and 591 support staff vacancies ahead of the upcoming school year.
Martin said she has heard of several teachers who are retiring earlier than they have to. She also said she has heard more often of younger teachers leaving for other professions with better work-life balance and pay. “There’s just a decision that people come to, that they’ve given all they can give, and they’re not getting the satisfaction from the work that they deserve for the effort they’re putting into it,” Martin said.
Elsewhere in the region, however, Arlington has reported a decrease in resignations — from 284 during the 2021-2022 school year to 164 last school year.
“I’m encouraged with the progress that we’re at a better place at this point than we had been in previous years, particularly given the situation nationally and even in our region with regards to very, very high vacancies for school systems around the country,” Arlington Superintendent Francisco Durán said at a recent school board meeting, adding that classrooms were 97.5 percent staffed with licensed teachers.
Fairfax County Public Schools, which has the largest public school enrollment in Virginia, lost 726 teachers last school year, a decline from 896 in 2021-2022.
Meanwhile, D.C.’s public school system reported 360 resignations last school year — an average of roughly 37 resignations per month, according to district officials. Between January and June 2022, 372 teachers quit their jobs, The Post previously reported, about 62 departures per month.
The trends in the D.C. area follow patterns in other parts of the country, with some districts faring better than others — producing a “mixed picture” of the teacher shortage crisis that has troubled schools in recent years, said Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers.
“We still have a huge shortage. We’re still hovering around 300,000 people leaving a year and not having enough people who want to come into the profession. We have retention problems. We have recruitment problems. We have respect issues all over the place,” Weingarten said.
But there are bright spots. “Places that have done contracts that focused on not just wages, as important as that is, but also [those focused on] working conditions and on the freedom for teachers to teach and have some input … those places are better,” Weingarten said.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare
D.C. is one of the districts that reached a long-awaited labor contract with its educators this past year — an agreement that provided the city’s 5,000 traditional public school teachers with a 12 percent raise over four years, retention bonuses and other benefits.
“Teachers are so invested in the work they’re doing and they want to be teaching, they want to stay in the classroom,” said Scott Goldstein, a former teacher and the executive director of EmpowerEd, an advocacy group. “A lot of them just need a little bit of hope that things are going to improve.”
The D.C. Council also passed a budget this year that includes a provision for a flexible schedule pilot program, aimed to give teachers more freedom throughout the school day. And the city’s new “Grow Your Own” initiative is being designed to develop high school students and paraprofessionals into licensed teachers.
But there is still room for improvement, Goldstein said, from retaining more Black male teachers to providing educators with more mental health support. And citywide — across D.C.’s traditional school district and its charter campuses — teacher retention fell from 74 percent between the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years to 70 percent between 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 — a figure that had not been seen in the city since before the coronavirus pandemic.
D.C. is also keeping a smaller share of its teachers in both sectors overall — 20 percent either left their jobs or changed roles between 2021-2022 and 2022-2023, compared with 15 percent the year prior and 13 percent after the pandemic started.
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A former elementary teacher at a high-poverty elementary school in the city’s Ward 7 said students’ behavioral issues are, in part, driving teachers out of schools.
The former teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she still has friends in D.C. Public Schools and is worried about them facing possible scrutiny, said she was once bitten so hard by a student that she bled. When she sought help, however, she said leaders blamed her classroom management skills and offered little support.
“I do think kids have picked up on the fact that nothing is going to happen,” said the teacher, who now works in construction as a project manager. She noted that her new job has an environment of “support and teamwork.”
Jacqueline Pogue Lyons, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, said she is concerned about the staffing gaps.
“I get nervous when I see large numbers of teachers leaving, in particular in Ward 7 and Ward 8 or in underserved schools and underserved communities,” she said. “It’s hardest to replace those leaders.”
School leaders elsewhere in the country are also struggling to fully staff their campuses. One Louisiana parish is short 200 teachers, a local news station reported. From Maine to California, officials are getting creative in the final days of summer to fill outstanding gaps.
At one Delaware elementary school, teachers have left in droves, said Christina Betts, who has been an educator for more than a decade. “People wouldn’t believe what happens in my classroom,” Betts said, referring to unchecked behavioral issues that teachers often have neither the time nor resources to adequately address.
Her school is also in need of bilingual educators. Many of her students speak Spanish, but she does not. “I just use a lot of pictures,” she said. “We’re just expected to do what every other teacher in the district is expected to do, which is kind of ridiculous.”
Other districts have fared better. Weingarten, of the national teacher’s union, pointed to Cincinnati Public Schools, where leaders have reduced the number of open positions by more than half, the local outlet Fox 19 reported.
The southwest Ohio school district holds recruitment events where educators can get hired on the spot and offer a starting salary for first-year teachers that is $15,000 more than what the state recommends.
“We’re still in a teacher shortage crisis, but it’s not the 10-alarm fire that it was last year or the year before,” Weingarten said, with the exception of political hot spots, such as Florida. If schools “work on pay, conditions and [giving teachers] some autonomy to address real student needs, they’re seeing both an increase in the number of certified people who are applying for jobs and they’re seeing people stay.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/08/09/dc-area-schools-teacher-resignations/