PHOENIX — It’s a profession that’s in a shortage and crisis, but solutions are being looked at to help recruit and retain teachers in Arizona.
As of the latest report in September, the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association says the state had 2,229 vacant teaching positions.
Marisol Garcia, the Arizona Education Association president, said the shortage will continue.
“The reality is that until we deal with the serious issue of pay, working conditions, we are never going to be able to get people to commit and stay in this profession,” Garcia said.
Republican Rep. Matt Gress proposed a bill to help compile concrete numbers on teacher retention. Gress told ABC15 that at this point, there are only organizations putting numbers together, which the ASPAA does. His bill would require the Arizona State Board of Education to study and compile a teacher retention report every year.
Governor Katie Hobbs also started the Educator Retention Task Force last year. One of the recommendations from the committee also discussed a study from the Arizona State Board of Education to analyze and put out a report on retention rates.
Gress said he knew the task force recommended the study as well, but he would have proposed the bill without it.
While those numbers could help policymakers find ways to keep teachers, educators and school leaders continue to say funding is a big issue.
“We know money is important and we are a smaller district, but we try to maximize the amount of pay that we can provide our teachers. But, it’s difficult to be competitive as an elementary district, particularly with the high school districts because they typically have more funding they can access for those teacher salaries,” said Susan Doyle, the chief human capital officer for the Balsz Elementary School District.
School districts are in the middle of a hiring frenzy, as this is the time of year they start putting out contracts for teachers for the next year. Many districts recently held job fairs to fulfill staff positions.
Doyle said 90% of their teachers from this school year have already signed on for the next school year. But even then, they’re still struggling to find some staff, including classified staff like bus drivers and more.
“What we find, particularly, if you go out to Target or to Chick-fil-A, people trying to hire and they’re paying higher or as much for our classified staff, that’s a challenge,” Doyle said.
She added that they try to offer hiring incentives. Other districts do, too, and have found some success with that. Other school districts, like the Cartwright Elementary School District, moved to four days and they previously told ABC15 they saw more applications come through because of it.
Pay is another issue that plagues the education industry, and a bill is making its way through the legislature to raise teacher pay while using Prop 123, drawing money from the State Land Trust. Currently, 6.9% of it goes toward education. The Democrat’s proposal would raise that withdrawal amount to 8.9% and include classified staff, however, the bill did not make it.
The Republican’s proposal would keep the 6.9% but direct it all to only teacher pay. If passed by the legislature, the measure would need to go to the voters for approval.
In the midst of all of this, Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College has been working to find solutions as students go through their program.
“We're saying maybe we don't have a recruitment, retention problem. What we have is really a workforce design problem,” said Dean Carole Basile of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. “We are really taking a look at schools. We're looking at the one teacher, one classroom model. We're trying to think about what it would look like for teachers to work in teams with distributed expertise, and then build an education system and educators that actually fit who we know kids are and what kids need.”
The college started an initiative called the Next Education Workforce that’s already seeing results as it’s been implemented in over 100 schools in 13 states, Basile said. The initiative focuses on ensuring teachers are not alone and work as a team with other educators around them.
“We need a new educator blueprint, and that's what we're trying to do here at Arizona State University is to think very differently about how do we move from the traditional to some kind of vision? How do we move from the teacher to teams of educators, how do we broaden our definition of teacher to educator? There's a lot of people, a lot of adults who could be surrounding kids and that kid’s need,” Basile explained.
As the days count down to the end of the legislative session and school year, districts continue to try and hire. Gress’ bill for the retention study has already made its way through the House and will soon go to the full Senate floor.
