A New Jersey school district is offering $10,000 signing bonuses to teachers in five subject areas in which officials have a hard time attracting candidates.
Camden, a K-12 district with approximately 7,500 students in one of the state’s largest cities, is offering the hiring incentives as some public school districts across the nation are offering similar bonuses for new or returning teachers to help combat staffing shortages worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bonuses are being offered to new teachers in Camden’s “highest-need subject areas,” which are special education, bilingual, English as a second language, math and science, said district spokesperson Sheena Yera.
Of the district’s 47 teaching vacancies as of Wednesday, 30 positions were eligible for the $10,000 bonuses, Yera said.
The bonus offer will remain in place until all 30 jobs are filled, she said. The 47 vacancies represent approximately 6% of the teaching positions in Camden.
Camden is at least the third New Jersey school district to offer signing bonuses to teachers in the past year. The Newark school district announced in June that new hires, in the same five subject areas noted in Camden, would be eligible for $4,000 signing bonuses.
The Paterson school district began offering $7,500 bonuses to all incoming teachers in September and, within four months, had agreed to bonuses for 149 newly-hired educators.
Similar incentives have been rolled out in other parts of the country.
In St. Paul, the second-largest school district in Minnesota, officials announced March 20 they are offering bonuses of up to $10,000 in “hard to fill positions,” starting with the 2023-2024 school year.
The district said it had more than 70 anticipated job openings in special education in September, including teachers, social workers, psychologists and speech and language pathologists, along with openings for math, chemistry, middle school science, physical education, Montessori and language immersion teachers.
In New Jersey, officials with the state’s largest teachers’ union expressed skepticism over school districts offering hiring bonuses.
“As a general matter, we have real concerns about bonuses as an approach,” said Steve Baker, spokesperson for the New Jersey Education Association.
“While different districts have different situations and different immediate needs, in general we need to make a career in public education more economically viable over the long term so we can both attract and retain the best people. Bonuses are an economic band-aid when what we need is a cure,” Baker said.
A survey by Education Week in February 2022 found that teacher bonuses mostly ranged between $1,000 and $5,000 and were subsidized by pandemic-related federal relief funds.
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Rob Jennings may be reached at rjennings@njadvancemedia.com.
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