A recent DeKalb County Board of Education meeting was interrupted by applause and cheers at some surprising good news: The district only had two teacher vacancies in August.
It’s a big difference from the start of the school year in recent years. Georgia’s third-largest school system reported more than 100 teacher openings in August last year, and more than 300 the year before that.
The low number of vacancies is reflected across metro Atlanta this year. Gwinnett, the state’s largest school system, reported 14 openings at the start of the academic year; Cobb County reported five; Atlanta Public Schools and Cherokee County each reported three. Fulton County Schools reported 66, which is still just about 1% of its 6,200 teaching positions.
The teacher shortage has been dominating the education field since the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers have been reporting burnout fueled by pay problems, stress from the pandemic and political pressure, and school districts have been working to find new ways to keep classrooms staffed.
“There’s a lot that’s been going on in the last couple of years that I think is really increasing the teacher pipeline,” said Carla Tanguay, the assistant dean for educator preparation and accreditation at Georgia State University. But the problem hasn’t been totally resolved. “I don’t think the shortage is over.”
A recent report from RAND, a nonpartisan research institute, found that teacher turnover rates across the U.S. are declining, meaning fewer teachers overall are leaving their jobs. But the nonpartisan Learning Policy Institute estimates that 1 in 8 teaching positions in the U.S. are unfilled or filled by teachers who are not fully certified for their assignment. And there are positions that are persistently difficult to fill in Georgia, including special education, elementary education and math and science.
Offering advancement opportunities has been a popular approach in the metro Atlanta area to fill the gap. There’s been a big regional push to give teachers opportunities to pursue advanced degrees, like the Georgia’s BEST program in Cobb and GSU’s Pathways to Teacher Credentialing Project. In each program, local school systems partner with a college or university to give teachers a chance to get a free master’s degree or higher.
Districts have also focused on increasing teacher compensation and hiring provisionally certified teachers. Atlanta Public Schools has a goal of having teacher salaries average $100,000 by 2030. Other districts have been recruiting potential teachers and training them themselves. The IGNITE DeKalb Teacher Residency, for example, is a yearlong program designed for people without any teaching experience. Some districts have also invested in training substitutes or paraprofessionals to become teachers.
“(The school districts) have become very innovative in how they retain and recruit their teachers,” Tanguay said.
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