Teacher hiring still a challenge

School districts across the nation are working hard to put teachers in the classroom, but some districts are finding it harder to fill those spaces than others due to what Sampson County Schools officials are calling a teacher shortage.

Brenda Nordin, director of Teacher Support at Sampson County Schools, said school districts everywhere are facing the challenge of finding teachers, and she stressed that the biggest factor seems to center around the fact that there aren’t as many students graduating from education programs as there used to be.

“I would say that the biggest thing that’s keeping us from getting teachers is the same thing that is true in every state — for whatever reason, our younger generation, they’re choosing to go into other professions,” Nordin said. “So our colleges of education are not turning out nearly the number of teacher ed graduates that they once did. And that’s not just in North Carolina.”

According to the Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics, the latest data from 2021 showed that 89,410 students in the United States graduated with a bachelor’s degree in education. A number that, according to the Department of Education, has been in the 80,000s since the 2015-16 school year.

But Nordin said while it was still difficult to try and recruit more educators, they have had a good year with retaining their beginner teachers.

“I was really happy a couple of weeks ago. I looked at my list of beginning teachers, and I have a lot. And up to that date, I only had four that are resigning for the next school year,” Nordin noted.

She pointed out that one of the factors she thinks helped keep teachers was their partnership with the North Carolina Beginner Teacher Support Program through the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She emphasized that with this program, beginner teachers are able to get support not only through the central office, but with a person dedicated only to them.

“It’s a state program, and it’s partially state funded. It provides us with an instructional coach whose only job is to work with our [beginner] teachers,” Nordin explained. “They’re not pulled like all of us are to go do this and go do this. Their whole focus is on these people. And that’s been a tremendous, tremendous success.”

And even though Sampson County Schools was able to retain all but four beginner teachers for the next school year, they are still pushing to hire new candidates.

Nordin said she’ll go to career fairs hosted by colleges where the system is either partners at, or even ones that they’re not officially partnered with. While at the career fair they’ll bring up their benefits, which includes the beginner teacher program, and how much they care about retention.

She credited these career fairs as something important when it comes to hiring new teachers.

But while Sampson County Schools officials said they’re having difficulties finding enough teachers, those in Clinton City Schools said that they have only two vacancies within the whole district.

“Right now, we only have, as far as teachers are concerned, two vacancies in the district for the 2024-25 school year. And by the conclusion of June, hopefully, those two positions will be filled, and we will have a full staff,” Sheila Peterson, the executive director of Human Resources for the city system, said.

But Peterson and Superintendent Dr. Wesley Johnson both admitted that it has been more difficult to recruit teachers due to fewer people going through the traditional route of getting an education degree from a college or university, and because the teaching agencies they use to recruit teachers are also offering positions where teachers are able to work from home.

“It has been difficult to recruit teachers because there’s so many agencies that will let them teach from home,” Peterson reiterated, noting the draw that is for many.

But even with the added difficulties in bringing in teachers, Peterson said Clinton City Schools has “always found a way to overcome their vacancies.” This includes looking inside the school system to see what they already have that they can us, like instructional assistants who already have a bachelor’s degree that they can then use to put them in a residency program instead.

“What we try to do is look within. So, if we have our instructional assistants that have bachelor’s degrees, we move them to our residency in order to ensure that they are teachers in our classrooms,” Peterson said.

Or creating fellowships, like the Dark Horse Fellows, that will hopefully bring students into the classroom to see if teaching is what they want to pursue.

“Dark Horse Fellows was started about three years ago. And hopefully by the (20)25-26 school year, our first Dark Horse Fellow will move into the classroom, which gives them the opportunity in their junior and senior year to see exactly what teaching entails, to see if they would want to endeavor in this great career,” Peterson said.

Or it can be other things as simple as recruiting graduates from their partnered universities or having partnerships with Troops to Teachers and Teachers of Tomorrow.

“We have tried to knock on every door in order to make sure that we have quality candidates and quality teachers in our classroom,” Peterson said.

And while schools are facing the difficulties of trying to find teachers for the next school year, Nordin was quick to stress that this time of year is when a lot of movement within the school districts will happen due to the school year coming to an end.