Kansas Underfunded Education And Cut Tenure. Now It Can't Find Enough Teachers To Fill Classrooms.
“In the next three years I think we’ll have maybe the worst teacher shortage in the country -- I think most of that is self-inflicted.”
Kansas school superintendent Alan Cunningham has been involved with hiring teachers for the past 35 years. In that time, he has never had a harder time filling positions than this year.
Qualified applicants for job openings in elementary schools or physical education “used to be a dime a dozen,” Cunningham said. Now Cunningham’s school district, Dodge City School District, is starting the school year with teachers in those positions who are not fully certified.
“We’ve had to go to substitute teachers,” said Cunningham.
Cunningham’s predicament is one superintendents throughout his state are facing. In Kansas, where teacher pay is low and schools are underfunded, hundreds of teaching positions throughout the state are still vacant just a few weeks before the start of the school year.
“This is the first year we’ve experienced a shortage as significantly as we are this year,” said Cunningham, referring specifically to his district. “We’ve had to combine some classrooms where we weren’t able to find a teacher and made class sizes significantly higher than we’d like them to be.”
Considering the conditions facing educators in Kansas, it is not an unlikely spot for a teacher shortage. Teachers in Kansas have some of the lowest average pay in the country. In 2014, the legislature voted to cut back on job protections for teachers that gave them certain due process rights if they faced dismissal. In June 2015, a three-judge district court panel said that the state’s school funding system is unconstitutional, in a ruling that was soon kicked up to the state Supreme Court. As a result of this funding system and pervasive tax cuts throughout the state that led to extreme revenue losses, several districts throughout the state had to end the 2014-2015 school year early because they did not have the money to stay open.
Capitalizing on the unrest among teachers, one school district in the neighboring state of Missouri even put up billboards in Kansas attempting to recruit dissatisfied teachers. Amid all this, an aging workforce has led to an increase in teacher retirements.Data from the state department of education shows that 2,326 educators retired after the 2014-2015 school year, compared to 1,260 in the 2011-2012 school year. Last year, 740 teachers decided to leave the profession and 654 teachers decided to leave the state; those numbers for 2011-2012 were 491 and 399 respectively.
As of Thursday evening, there were over 450 teaching and non-teaching school jobs posted on Kansas Underfunded Education And Cut Tenure. Now It Can't Find Enough Teachers To Fill Classrooms.:
