Despite a pay raise, Oklahoma’s teacher shortage is almost the same as it was last year.
Districts responding to the Oklahoma State School Boards Association’s fifth-annual survey reported 494 vacancies, down just 7 percent from last year.
OSSBA Executive Director Shawn Hime said the teacher pay raise that was supposed to make a big dent in the teacher shortage was hampered by uncertainty as it faced a potential veto referendum until just last month.
"While morale is up in our schools, we really missed an opportunity to leverage the new pay raise to recruit new teachers and retain teachers at the level we wanted to. So, vacancies from last year to this year are very similar," Hime said.
The survey also found teachers with emergency certifications are still being used at a high rate and more than half of districts have the hardest time finding special education teachers.
After special education, high school science, high school math, elementary, middle school math and middle school science were the most difficult positions to fill.
There are some reasons to be optimistic, though.
"We had over 100 school districts that said they were going to add teachers back this year. That was new," Hime said. "And then only 28 percent said that they expected to have larger class sizes due to the teacher shortage or funding crisis. That was down from 55 percent a year ago."
Hime said with the teacher raise firmly in place now, things should improve and it’s time to think about long-term education spending to start reducing class sizes and making other strides.
"Many legislative leaders have already talked about an investment program to annualize some investment in education, similar to what we did for roads and bridges, to where we can put $75 million to $100 million a year into education over the next five to eight years," Hime said.
Hime said state and education leaders also need to convince today’s high-school students teaching is a good career path.
