Teacher and Staff Challenges

Shane Robertson took a “massive pay cut” when he pivoted from working as an auto mechanic to become a teacher six years ago.

The career switch for Robertson, who now teaches automotive technology in Louisa County High School's career and technical education program in Virginia, came at a time when he wanted to play a bigger role in the lives of his two sons. 

During those early teaching days, Robertson was paying $2,000 per month for child care — and he had to work on cars over the summer to help defray those costs.

But that wasn’t sustainable for Robertson, and it began to throw a wrench in his plan to spend more time with his family.

“The biggest problem is … I would have probably had to pick up another job due to the cost of child care,” Robertson said. If he could only stay afloat by working nights, he said, "it kind of would have defeated the purpose.”

But starting in fall 2021, he was able to more than halve that $2,000 monthly bill to just $800 by putting both of his children in Louisa County Public Schools’ preschool program, the Little Lions Learning Lab. The program for 3- and 4-year-olds enrolls children of district staff, with priority given to teachers. That meant Robertson could benefit from the program for three years total, from 2020 to 2023.

A creative way to tackle staffing woes

The program was designed as a creative solution to address teacher recruitment and retention challenges in Louisa County Schools, according to Superintendent Doug Straley. Not only does Little Lions provide much-needed child care for current teachers, but it also gives high school students hands-on teaching experience working with children enrolled in the program. 

Plus, it has inspired a sizable number of students to pursue teaching, with some even returning to work at Louisa County Schools, according to Straley and Kenny Bouwens, the district’s career and technical education director. 

Little Lions Learning Lab launched in fall 2019 with the help of a $50,000 grant from the Virginia Department of Education, Bouwens said. The on-campus program typically serves 20 children per year in the rural 5,000-student district. Tuition runs $400 per child per month in addition to a $250 annual supply fee. 

That tuition covers the staffing costs of one full-time teacher and two instructional assistants, and the supply fee takes care of materials, Bouwens said. 

Since the child care center launched, it has received several statewide recognitions, including the Innovative Practice Award from the Virginia Department of Education in 2023 and first place in the Workforce Readiness Award from the Virginia School Board Association in 2021. 

A benefit for teachers

It's no surprise that teachers who have children would highly value their district providing child care benefits. After all, average child care costs for preschoolers run $9,120 per year, while the average teacher earns $69,544 a year – meaning child care eats up 13% of annual income.

For instance, surveys of 1,030 teachers nationwide between November 2020 and January 2021 found that teachers valued a $3,000 per child subsidy — with a $6,000 annual family cap — as much as a 10% increase in salary. However, they preferred the 10% raise if they received only a $1,500 child care benefit, according to a working paper published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.

Because districts can cap child care benefits and they are only used by a portion of teachers anyway, the study said it “is far less expensive” in the long term to subsidize up to $6,000 than to increase teacher salaries for all. 

The study also noted that even teachers ineligible for child care benefits viewed the idea positively. “One possible explanation for this result is that family-friendly policies serve as a positive signal of workplace quality,” the study said. “Another is that aspiring parents are anticipating future benefits.”

Don’t just convert a classroom

Virginia Lovison, the study’s lead author and an associate director of research and evaluation for Deloitte Access Economics, said she has heard from countless teachers who had to quit the profession because child care costs exceeded their salaries. 

“If school districts were to subsidize the cost of child care while teachers still had young children, let’s say under 5, then I suspect this would lead some teachers to recalibrate their decisions regarding whether or not it makes sense to keep teaching,” Lovision said. 

While districts can create their own child care centers, Lovison suggests school leaders first consider gauging interest among their teachers. Then, she said, it might be best to initially offer a child care subsidy or reimbursement because that option is likely more affordable for a district than building a center. 

Districts can then use participation data gleaned from those kinds of programs to help determine if an on-site child care center would be more cost effective.

Based on his experience launching the Little Lions Learning Lab, Bouwens advises district leaders to plan carefully.

“Don’t try to just take a classroom and turn it into a day care program,” Bouwens said. “You’ve really got to think through all the aspects of running a program like this and all the staffing requirements, and have policies and procedures in place to help you navigate” any tricky situations ahead. 

For example, Little Lions has faced challenges particularly with enrollment capacity. 

Each year, the center has a waitlist of some 30 children, Bouwens said.

The program has helped to already recruit new teachers from other districts, Bouwens said. Unfortunately, however, the program is too full for those new teachers who already have children old enough to enroll.

Yet he said he's hopeful more need will be met in the future as the district has been approved to build a new CTE center that will house a bigger space for Little Lions. “We’re really looking forward to having that done, so that we have the opportunity” to strategically recruit.

On the retention side, Bouwens said there are countless teachers like Robertson who have stayed with the district to benefit from the program. “He’s just a part of the Louisa County community and family, and that means something to our employees,” Bouwens said. “It absolutely helps us retain and recruit high-quality teachers.”

Republican and Democratic senators agreed that improving teacher pay is a bipartisan matter during a hearing held June 20 by the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Lawmakers and witnesses also stressed the need to address declining student achievement due to pandemic-driven learning loss as teacher shortages persist. 

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, said spending on education has outpaced inflation despite math and reading score declines. Cassidy also expressed hesitancy to use federal funds for a teacher minimum wage like the one outlined in the Pay Teachers Act introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, which would require a minimum national salary of $60,000 for teachers.

Several witnesses testified about their own experiences as teachers and weighed in on solutions to educator shortages, including teacher raises, grow-your-own programs and accessible early childhood education programs. Other witnesses, however, said raising pay alone will not do enough to improve recruitment and retention.

Throughout the Senate hearing, witnesses and senators explored if there are ways at the federal level to address teacher shortages and low teacher pay.

William Kirwan, the vice chair of Maryland’s Accountability and Implementation Board, explained during testimony how a statewide education plan known as the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future is working to recruit and retain its teachers. The blueprint passed in Maryland’s General Assembly in 2021 and will increase education funding by $3.8 billion annually over the next 10 years. 

Under the blueprint, all teachers in the state must be paid a starting salary of $60,000 by July 1, 2026, Kirwan said. On top of that, teachers can receive another $10,000 annually if they are certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, as well as an additional $7,000 per year if they work in schools that serve students in high-poverty communities. 

“With the blueprint, teachers could earn a six-figure salary after a half-dozen years in the profession," said Kirwan, adding a national survey shows that Maryland led the country in the increase of students entering teacher preparation programs.

After participating in a grow-your-own program in the School District of Philadelphia to become a full-time special education teacher, Gemayel Keyes said it’s crucial that federal investments make similar programs a priority for funding. Keyes worked as a paraprofessional for the majority of his 18-year career and just completed his first year of teaching. 

Keyes noted that paraprofessionals in his district only earn between $16,000 to $30,000 a year. During that time, he also worked a second job because it was difficult to survive on a paraprofessional salary, Keyes said. But with the help of a Para Pathway program in the district, Keyes was able to attain the necessary degrees cost-free to become a special education teacher and earn a higher wage.

Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow in education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, spoke from his experience as a former public school teacher in New York’s South Bronx, noting that higher teacher pay will not remedy other factors that lead to teacher shortages and burnout.

There are “deteriorating classroom conditions, shoddy curriculum, and quality therapeutic roles teachers are now expected to play in addition to their core academic roles,” Pondiscio said. “Bluntly, we are asking teachers to do too many things for them to do any of them well.”

Cassidy also raised questions about restoring public trust in education when federal spending increased alongside declines in test scores. He noted that 10 out of the 11 states that passed laws this year to raise teacher pay were through Republican legislatures. 

“But the federal government dictating how states spend their money does not address the root cause of why teachers are struggling to teach in the classroom,” Cassidy said. “More mandates and more funding cannot be the only answer we come up with.”

But Sanders maintained his push for a $60,000 starting salary for teachers nationwide. 

“If kids are going to get a good start to life, open the doors. Let’s have decent-paid teachers, and let’s not worry about the cost of that,” Sanders said. “Because we’re going to save money long-term if these kids do well in school.”

The hearing comes as more research reveals that teacher compensation falls short by an average of $18,000 in base pay when compared to other professionals, according to a Rand Corp. report.

Teachers surveyed in early 2024 said they worked nine more hours per week — for a total of 53 hours — and averaged $18,000 less in base pay compared to other professionals, according to a Rand Corp. survey released June 18.

About twice as many teachers reported frequent job-related stress or burnout compared to other professionals, and about three times as many teachers reported difficulties in coping with that stress. Only 36% of teachers, compared to 51% of other professionals, said their base pay was adequate.

Black teachers were more likely to report lower base pay than other teachers and significantly less likely to say that their base pay was adequate. Women teachers reported significantly higher rates of frequent job-related stress and burnout, but significantly lower base pay, than their men counterparts.

Teachers have consistently reported lower well-being than similar working professionals since 2021, according to the Rand report.

While teacher burnout, pay and turnover have been longstanding major concerns in K-12, their impact was compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic when long and challenging working hours became the norm.

"State and district education leaders quickly moved to enact policies designed to recruit and retain teachers," said the Rand report. "Many of these policies raised pay but did not address working conditions, despite evidence that both are necessary to improve teacher retention."

Teacher bonuses, pay raises, limiting class sizes and other recruitment and retention initiatives became part of many school systems' game plans for spending COVID relief funding. According to a 2022 report from FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University, school systems nationwide were spending up to $20 billion in American Rescue Plan funds to address some of these concerns.

But district leaders continue to grapple with issues like teacher pay and turnover, especially as pandemic relief funding winds down.

In the Rand report, teachers cited managing student behavior, low salaries and administrative work outside of teaching such as paperwork and teacher evaluations as their top sources of job-related stress. Teachers who considered their current base salaries inadequate wanted about a $16,000 increase in base pay on average.

Black and Hispanic teachers were both more likely than White teachers to say they intended to leave their jobs or the profession by the end of the 2023-24 school year.

“This is RAND’s fourth consecutive year collecting data that raise concerns about high stress and low pay in the teacher workforce,” said Sy Doan, lead author of the report and a policy researcher at Rand Corp. “Although teacher well-being seems to have stabilized at pre-pandemic levels, our data raise questions about the sustainability of the profession for Black teachers and female teachers in particular.”

The report is based on findings from nationally representative surveys of 1,479 teachers and 501 working adults between January and February 2024.

While Rand’s State of the American Teacher survey was not administered prior to the pandemic, researchers said the percentages of teachers reporting job-related stress in 2023 and 2024 are similar to results from a 2017 survey from the American Federation of Teachers.

That survey found nearly two-thirds, or 61%, of educators said work was "always" or "often stressful," which was twice the rate reported by other workers.

A new Minnesota law is enacting stricter requirements to become a special education teacher in the state, including limits on those who pursue alternative pathways.

Specifically, the legislation prohibits special educators with a Tier 1 license from teaching for more than three years under that level of certification, which only requires the teacher to have a bachelor’s degree. Tier 1 special education teachers must also receive high-quality professional development and undergo “intensive supervision” as part of a teacher mentoring program under the law.

The change comes as more teachers of color are likely to hold these alternative teaching licenses, according to a 2023 report by the Minnesota Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board on the supply and demand of teachers in Minnesota.

“Part of this is due to the overall low number of teachers in these race/ethnicity categories, but also speaks to the need to provide teacher preparation pathways to move individuals up the tiers as a central way to increase professionally licensed teachers of color and Indigenous teachers in Minnesota,” the report said. 

Special education teachers are also among the top groups to hold a Tier 1 or Tier 2 license in the state, the Minnesota PELSB found. Additionally, the three most difficult to fill licensure areas in school districts are in the special education field.

While the law may potentially hurt Minnesota school districts’ ability to address special educator shortages and diversify the teaching profession, there’s a chance the state prevented the loss of federal funding. 

The law sought to address a threat made in May 2023 by the U.S. Department of Education to cut $219 million in special education dollars to the state if it didn’t adjust its licensure system for special educators, the Sahan Journal reported. 

The Minnesota Department of Education had 60 days to submit a corrective action plan, in which it said it will make necessary changes to state law during the next legislative session in early 2024. Federal officials approved Minnesota’s plan in August. 

Before the updates to this law, Minnesota special education teachers with Tier 1 licenses could instruct for more than three years, according to a May 2023 letter from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs, which was obtained by the Sahan Journal. The letter addressed to the Minnesota Department of Education said that approach violated Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which stipulates that a special educator with an alternative certification may teach for no more than three years. 

The Education Department’s letter to Minnesota and the new law that followed demonstrate the challenges states face as they balance special education teacher shortages with federal compliance.

Unlike with flexibilities provided to general education teachers, the Education Department’s Office of Special Education Programs in 2022 warned state directors of special education that special educators and related personnel may not have their certification or license requirements waived on an emergency, temporary or provisional basis. The office also flagged that teachers pursuing alternative certification must have a special education certificate and follow certain federal requirements.

It’s been one year since U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called on colleges to tap into Federal Work-Study funds to place more of their students in support roles — particularly tutoring services — in K-12 schools. 

Signs of success are starting to emerge as more higher education institutions reveal growing interest among students to tutor in K-12 schools when they are compensated. Not only are colleges finding plenty of tutors, these often newer paid opportunities are also beginning to create pathways into diversifying the teaching profession, some tutoring research experts say.

And schools are directly seeing benefits to student success as a result of these tutoring partnerships. 

College tutors in action

In 2018, Spelman College, a historically Black college for women, launched a high-impact literacy tutoring program in partnership with Atlanta Public Schools. Since then, the program known as SpelREADS has placed a total of 1,566 Spelman undergraduates in APS to work with 1,237 students in the district, said Jilo Tisdale, director of the college’s Bonner Office of Civic Engagement, which oversees SpelREADS. 

On average, the elementary and middle school students who enter the SpelREADS program are 1 1/2 years behind their grade level reading, Tisdale said. After going through the program for one year, APS students are just slightly less than a semester behind in reading, Tisdale has found.  

“The progress at which students at SpelREADS are closing the gap to grade level [reading] is accelerated by their participation,” Tisdale said.

SpelREADS pays undergraduates $300 per semester to individually tutor APS students for 3 hours per week, the program also provides free transportation for its undergraduates to consistently visit schools, Tisdale added. This semester, SpelREADS hired 60 total Spelman students to tutor across six different schools — often during the school day. 

Tisdale added that it’s vital for the college to provide transportation, which she said costs about $100,000 per year to operate.

“There are some students who just couldn’t even consider doing it if transportation wasn’t provided,” Tisdale said. “One of the things that schools were most hesitant about in the beginning was the reliability of tutors.”

This is also the first year SpelREADS has tried to tap into Federal Work-Study program dollars to help bolster the tutoring program, but there have been challenges, she said.

Because SpelREADS only allows tutors to work 3 hours per week, it limits students’ ability to fully use Federal Work-Study funds, Tisdale said. On top of that, Spelman students cannot work multiple jobs to receive Federal Work-Study pay. 

Another way Tisdale is considering working around this issue is to see if schools would allow SpelREADS tutors to help with other K-12 student support services, like in afterschool programs. 

“What would really be helpful was if the Department of Education offered grants to support the other expenses of delivering high-quality, high-impact tutoring and mentoring,” Tisdale said. “The transportation is the piece that is really prohibitive.”

Paying tutors and expanding teaching pathways

Over the years, Tisdale said she knows of at least 13 undergraduates from SpelREADS who have decided to pursue a full-time teaching career as a result of being a tutor, though she says that’s likely an underreported figure since the program hasn’t closely tracked it. 

Programs like SpelREADS “absolutely” help to diversify the teacher workforce, she added, because it opens up new compensated opportunities for students to actually explore the teaching profession firsthand. 

Research released this month in a working paper from Brown University’s Annenberg Institute demonstrates how crucial pay is for recruiting tutors from colleges. 

The study ultimately found that advertising monetary compensation for tutoring roles increased applications on college campuses by 196% compared to tutoring advertisements that did not push out pay messaging. As a result, students were also 205% more likely to be hired as tutors under monetary advertising for such roles.

As of May, 50 higher education institutions have pledged to be a part of the National Partnership for Student Success’ Higher Education Coalition, said Kate Cochran, NPSS’ managing director. Members include Arizona State University, Princeton University, Howard University and Virginia Tech. 

NPSS is a public-private partnership spearheading the White House tutoring initiative to place 250,000 tutors, coaches and mentors in public schools by summer 2025 — and the group was already 75% of the way there as of September 2023. 

As part of its Higher Education Coalition, colleges and universities pledge to set a two-year goal that they will use Federal Work-Study funds to hire college students into positions as tutors, mentors, student success coaches, post-secondary transition coaches, or wraparound student support coordinators at K-12 schools. Alternatively, they may also substantially increase the number of college students serving in those roles, no matter the funding source. 

Another challenge with using Federal Work-Study to pay college tutors, Cochran said, is that sometimes students want to work more tutoring hours but are limited by their total Federal Work-Study award. 

Regardless of the potential hiccups along the way, data has shown that colleges and universities are beginning to tap more into Federal Work-Study funds to hire tutors, said Nancy Waymack, director of research partnerships and policy at Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator, a nonprofit research organization that promotes high-impact tutoring in schools.  

For Waymack, it’s refreshing to see students earn pay for tutoring considering the role has historically been viewed as a volunteering opportunity.

“Using Work-Study, using AmeriCorps funds, other federal resources or resources that come from other places to pay tutors just opens up the field a lot more for many different students who otherwise might have been doing another job on campus,” Waymack said. “And they wouldn’t have that opportunity to be in a school, work with kids, and see educators who are teaching every day that they might want to emulate somewhere down the road.”

At SpelREADS, there’s consistently been more student interest than available tutoring slots, and more schools want to participate — but the program can’t afford to expand, Tisdale said. Even so, she said she hopes to eventually expand SpelREADS to every APS school, if possible, by partnering with other local colleges.

A little over two years ago, the Hollister R-V School District in Missouri always had a vacancy in special education teaching roles.Now, however, those hard-to-fill spots are no longer an issue at the 1,350-student school district.

That's because the small, rural district — which previously competed with bigger and suburban districts offering higher pay — began partnering with Missouri State University’s Pathways for Paraprofessionals program, also known as Pathways for Paras, said Kristina Smith, the district’s director of special services.

"I have personally experienced that critical shortage and not having qualified applicants that were applying, and that’s not the case the last two years because of this program,” Smith said. “So I’m super grateful as a district administrator knowing I have qualified individuals in front of our students.”

The Pathways for Paras program is a partnership between Missouri's K-12 schools and Missouri State's College of Education to help prepare future special education teachers. About 200 districts are participating, equaling a third of the state's districts, according to Reesha Adamson, program director and associate dean of the College of Education at Missouri State.

The program follows the registered apprenticeship model from the U.S. Department of Labor. 

Specifically, it gives paraprofessionals, who support students in the classroom under the supervision of a licensed educator, the opportunity to earn a teaching certification in special education online via asynchronous and synchronous learning, while also allowing them to continue working in their current role. The program also offers classes on Missouri State’s campus for students who want an in-person learning experience, Adamson said.

“Where other institutes of higher ed across the state have had declining enrollment, we’ve had increasing enrollment,” Adamson said, attributing that success at least partly to this program.

Among the program’s first cohort of students, 24 graduated in December, and all of them were employed as special education teachers in Missouri, said Marci Dowdy, the program’s coordinator. Additionally, 38 students are expected to graduate in May, most of whom have been hired to work as special education teachers next school year in the state.

How it works

Registered apprenticeship programs like the one at Missouri State are needed at a time when 1 in 2 special education teachers lack proper certification in the state, Adamson said. 

The growing interest and success of the state's Pathways for Paras program also comes as the registered teacher apprenticeship model is gaining momentum nationwide as a way to address educator shortages — including the consistently critical shortage area of special education. 

Some 34 states and Puerto Rico have established registered teacher apprenticeship programs across instructional subject areas with DOL of April, according to the U.S. Department of Education. 

There are now seven other higher education institutions in Missouri with similar registered apprenticeship programs, Adamson said. Most of those focus on preparing special educators and early childhood educators.

“I think what we’ve been most successful about is leveraging resources from other entities" at the federal level beyond the Education Department, Adamson said. 

Pathways for Paras relies on a “braided” funding model that taps into a combination of federal, state, university and community-based organization dollars, she said. State and federal workforce development funds have particularly helped offset expenses that have traditionally kept students from being successful in higher education, she said.

In fact, workforce development funds have enabled the program to cover costs like transportation and child care, Adamson said. Because of the multiple funding sources in the registered apprenticeship model, the program can provide assistance beyond the financial aid packages that higher education institutions usually offer, she said. 

Program tuition typically runs $10,000 per year, Adamson said, “but we have enough resources and support that individuals can go to school at little to no cost.”

The option for remote classes also help participants in rural districts, like Hollister R-V. 

The district recently offered one of its paraprofessionals — who is nearing a degree in special education through the program — a full-time special education teaching role for the 2024-25 school year.

“I’m just a solution-minded individual," said the district's Smith. "I’m not going to sit at the table and continue to talk about the same problem over and over and over, and Missouri State through the Pathways program has provided that opportunity to be a win for districts when we are in a critical shortage of special education teachers.”

State data highlights the persistent challenge teacher shortages continue to pose in Illinois, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In Wisconsin, the state’s Department of Public Instruction finds teachers are exiting the state’s workforce “at an alarming rate,” according to a report released April 11 that analyzes educator retention data from the 2021-22 school year. 

About 4 out of 10 new teachers leave the state or the profession completely within their first six years of teaching. On top of that, just 68% of students who earned a degree from an education preparation program in the state ended up working for a Wisconsin public school, the report said.

Meanwhile, a survey of 975 Illinois education agencies conducted by the Illinois State Board of Education found 4,096 teaching positions were left unfilled for the 2023-24 school year — a 3% vacancy rate. In a separate report by the Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools, 91% of 756 education leaders surveyed said they experienced minor, serious or very serious problems with teacher shortages. 

And in February, the Mississippi Department of Education reported 2,775 teacher vacancies statewide in 2023-24, an increase of 182 vacancies from the prior school year.

Like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania has pointed to challenges with its teacher workforce pipeline. For instance, the state certified about 20,000 new teachers annually 10 years ago. Now, that number has dropped dramatically to just 5,000 to 6,000 new certified teachers per year, according to the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency.

Finding solutions

As one solution, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro signed into law in 2023 a $10 million statewide Educator Pipeline Support Grant Program. Eligible student teachers will receive $10,000, with an additional $5,000 available for those in high-need areas. Program recipients must also teach in Pennsylvania for three years after earning their teaching certification. 

Since the applications for the program opened last week, the state has received over 4,500 applications as of April 12, the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency told K-12 Dive. 

The Illinois surveys also asked district leaders about potential and ongoing solutions to address educator shortages. Almost 30% of leaders said their districts’ initiatives to place student teachers in classrooms and improve working conditions were effective in bolstering recruitment and retention. About half of leaders also said increasing the number of eligible days a substitute teacher could work helped. 

Leaders said the most promising solutions for addressing educator shortages include modifying a district’s pension tier system, augmenting loan forgiveness programs for teachers, and increasing scholarships for teacher candidates. 

Signs of teacher retention and staffing issues linger in national data, as well. Some 11% of teachers said they were very likely to look for a new job in the 2023-24 school year, according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center. Some 70% of teachers also said their schools are very or somewhat understaffed.

At the same time, districts are weighing teacher layoffs this spring amid declining enrollments, inflation-related budget challenges, and the wind-down of federal pandemic relief funds. Even as layoffs continue, concerns with teacher retention are still ongoing.

To address teacher shortages, more states and school districts are developing registered teacher apprenticeship programs with the U.S. Department of Labor to help aspiring educators get paid while they earn a teaching certification and train in the classroom alongside veteran teachers. In fact, 34 states and Puerto Rico have established registered teacher apprenticeship programs as of April, according to the U.S. Department of Education. 

More teachers are facing layoffs this spring as school districts handle declining enrollments, inflation-related budget challenges, and the wind-down of federal pandemic relief funds.

San Diego Unified School District, for instance, announced plans in March to cut over 220 full-time positions, with 127 educators expected to be among those laid off. The anticipated staff reductions come as the California district seeks to offset a $93.7 million budget shortfall in the 2024-25 school year and grapples with a $163.7 million shortfall expected the following school year. 

Smaller districts are facing similar budget challenges. 

In Massachusetts, Public Schools of Brookline proposed budget reductions in March to address a roughly $2.2 million funding gap. Suggested staff cuts include all elementary foreign language teachers, four elementary literacy coaches and half of the district’s technology specialists.

Layoffs could also be on the horizon for Oregon’s Portland Public Schools. Then-superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero flagged a need for $30 million in cuts for the district’s 2024-25 budget in a February letter to families. Few details have emerged, but it’s expected that half of the cuts would be made at the school level, with the remainder coming from the district’s central office operations. 

Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, has long forecasted teacher layoffs would increasingly pop up across the country — for both this year and next — as school district enrollments continued to decline, and as the deadline to obligate federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief dollars nears in late September. 

The Edunomics Lab is tracking local news reports on teacher layoffs, and Roza said her team has noticed more schools this year are announcing cuts to instructional roles.

Declining enrollment is not a new trend for some districts, but ESSER funds allowed school leaders to delay budget cuts that would have occurred otherwise, Roza said. 

“When the ESSER money came, it basically provided a stay of execution in the sense that there’s all this extra money, so you didn’t need to do the shrinking, right now, of your system,” Roza said. But now districts “have to do the last four years of shrinking all at once instead of doing it gradually year by year. In fact, some of them, instead of shrinking, hired new people. So it’s kind of a double whammy.”

Additionally, inflation drove some districts to give higher than normal pay raises for staff, she said. “Now, though, for those pay raises, they may have to lay people off.”

One example can be seen in San Diego, where the district avoided a teacher strike in May 2023 when it reached an agreement with the San Diego Education Association. The union contract guaranteed a retroactive 10% pay increase for the 2022-23 school year and a 5% raise for the 2023-24 school year. 

Portland Public Schools also warned of major budget cuts in the near future after it reached a three-year, $175 million contract with its teachers union in November. The agreement, which included a 13.8% cumulative cost-of-living increase for all educators districtwide, came after the union’s strike shut down Portland schools for 11 days. 

How to best approach layoffs

Some labor union contracts include provisions specifying how districts can carry out staff layoffs, Roza said. 

During contract negotiations, she said, contract clauses dictating how districts approach staff reductions should be closely reviewed. “Because districts may have provisions in there that they forgot about, that say ridiculous things like ‘We’re going to start in reverse order of who is hired’ regardless of the value the teacher brings. We should be protecting our most effective teachers.”

Roza cited one example in Michigan’s Ann Arbor Public Schools, where the union contract states that the last several digits of a teacher’s Social Security number would be the tiebreaker for layoffs after considering years of experience with the district. The teacher with the lowest Social Security number in the event of a tie will be considered to have the most seniority.

Seniority-based layoffs have raised concerns over the years since that can negatively impact racial diversity. That’s because teachers of color are more likely to be in the earlier stages of their careers compared to White educators. 

Still, seniority continues to be one of the two most common factors districts use for determining layoffs, according to a February 2023 analysis of 148 of the nation’s largest districts by the National Council on Teacher Quality. The other top factor considered is teacher performance.

Seniority-based policies are also more likely to harm high-poverty schools, which tend to hire less experienced teachers, Roza said. “You don’t have to use seniority in how to lay off [educators]. You could just say, ‘We’re going to maybe reduce some of our more expensive, less effective programs.’”

Attrition should be avoided in layoff strategies, if possible, because it could lead to leaving hard-to-fill subjects like math and science with fewer teachers, Roza added. 

District leaders should be communicating about layoffs to employees and their school communities as early and as often as possible, Roza said. It’s also crucial to communicate which instructional subjects are safe from staff reductions — if that's the case. 

Otherwise, last-minute announcements about pending layoffs will catch the community off-guard, making it more difficult for the school board to vote on its budget if public reactions are pouring in, Roza said.

Some 12% of California school nutrition jobs stood vacant at the end of the 2022-23 school year, according to a recent survey by Food Insight Group, a food systems research organization. For comparison, that’s nearly twice as high as the 6.6% national vacancy rates in the accommodation and food services industry, the report found. 

Of the 190 California food service directors surveyed, 62% expressed concerns that they wouldn’t have enough staff to meet growing student participation in school meals, particularly since the state became the first to pass a universal school meal law in 2021.

Compensation is another common hardship for California school food service directors. More than half — 57% — said they are worried their pay benefits were not competitive enough to keep up with nearby institutions or businesses.

Staffing shortages are being felt on a wide scale, as 90% of school nutrition directors said in a School Nutrition Association survey released in January that they faced staffing shortages heading into the current school year. But the latest survey by Food Insight Group, released alongside the California School Nutrition Association and the Chef Ann Foundation, shows California may be getting hit the hardest.

California’s staffing challenges highlight some of the downsides that can come with adopting permanent universal school meal policies, which allow schools to serve free meals to students regardless of income. Universal school meal policies also drive up student participation in breakfast and lunch, according to a recent study by the Food Research & Action Center, which advocates for universal meal policies.

But more student participation can also lead to a higher need for resources and staffing within a school district’s nutrition services department. In California, FRAC found the average student participation in both breakfast and lunch collectively jumped by 161,359 students — a 3.3% increase between the 2018-19 and 2022-23 school years.

Additionally, one third of California school nutrition directors said they added new positions in their department during 2022-23, according to Food Insight Group.

Another upcoming challenge that could further strain California’s school nutrition staffing is a new state law taking effect in April requiring a $20 per hour minimum wage for fast food workers. The new law does not apply to K-12 food service workers, likely making wage competition even more difficult for schools.

Elsewhere, school districts are facing difficulties competing with local food service employers. Florida’s Orange County Public Schools, for instance, has to compete for the same employees sought by Walt Disney World and Universal Studios in the tourist-heavy city of Orlando.

Even so, food service directors throughout the country have no choice but to get creative in their recruitment and retention policies, such as adopting pay for performance programs for managers and hiring an employee solely dedicated to school nutrition staffing. 

Competition for foodservice staff is rampant in a tourist-heavy location like Orlando, Florida.

As Orange County Public Schools searches for new ways to find and retain school nutrition staff in its cafeterias, the Florida district has to persistently fight for the same employees sought by Disney World, Universal Studios, Sea World and thousands of other area restaurants and hotels.

The district oversees 1,500 staff and managers in food and nutrition services, said Mark Watson, the department’s senior director at Orange County Public Schools. At the same time, there’s a shortage of 150 staff — a small portion of which are manager positions. 

“There’s always been a shortage, but never this much,” Watson said. “In the last four or five years, it’s been a little bit higher because of the pandemic, and people want to work remote, so it’s been a challenge for us.”

Orange County Public Schools — with around 208,800 students — is not alone in this common staffing plight. Some 90% of school nutrition directors reported facing staffing shortages heading into the 2023-24 school year, according to a recent School Nutrition Association survey of 1,343 school nutrition directors. 

Creative retention approaches

There are some bright spots, though, as Orange County Public Schools saw a decline in open school nutrition staff positions in the last 1.5 years — dropping from 200 to 150, Watson said. 

In recent years, the district adapted to staffing challenges by holding regional job fairs for hourly positions and offering $2,000 sign-on and $200 referral bonuses. 

Those bonuses are built into the district’s budget as a result of union negotiations, he said. 

Watson also works to ensure his staff are regularly recognized for their work through awards, team building activities and an annual gala. 

This school year, the district also launched a pay for performance program for food and nutrition services managers. On average, managers make about $42,000 per year, Watson said. But under the goal-oriented program, they can earn up to an additional $7,500 annually.

Managers can earn some extra cash if they meet a certain number of district goals set around priorities such as food costs, staff training and health inspections, Watson said. The more goals managers meet, the larger the portion of $7,500 they will receive, he added.

Now several months into the program, Watson said he hopes it will help retain both managers and staff, because the goals push managers to take better care of their employees by focusing on retention efforts.

“You have to put a little money aside in your budget for retention to recognize people, to say thank you for doing a good job,” Watson said. “The districts who don’t do that, that’s where they have a lot of people jumping ship basically and going to places that are going to do that.”

The impacts of a ‘revolving door’

When a district faces school nutrition staffing shortages, the cost to train new employees is high, Watson said. “If you have a revolving door, your expenses are going to go up tremendously.”

That revolving door of new staff also means there’s a lack of consistency in service, and the “students feel that,” he said. Inconsistency can also lead to less personal interactions between students and school nutrition staff.

The shortage, overall, might lead schools to close down certain serving lines for meals. When lunch lines grow longer as a result, Watson said it disrupts students’ time to eat and can ultimately interfere with instructional time, because more time is needed to get through the line and finish a meal.

As universal school meals become more of a reality programs through state-level legislation or the federal Community Eligibility Provision, staffing challenges can be further strained.

Orange County Public Schools is in its first year serving free meals under the Community Eligibility Provision. Daily participation in lunch alone increased by 17,000 meals served compared to last year, according to Watson. That growth in demand, he said, would have been incredibly difficult to sustain if there were still 200 open positions like the previous year.

At Colorado's Aurora Public Schools, student breakfast and lunch participation jumped 13% to 20% since universal school meals were implemented at the start of this school year, according to Shannon Solomon, the district’s director of nutrition services.

The state’s Healthy Schools Meals for All law passed in a referendum vote in November 2022 and will also provide schools additional funding in the 2024-25 school year for front line kitchen staff wage increases or stipends.

Dedicate a role for staffing

There are only three open staff positions out of 285 in Aurora’s nutrition services department, Solomon said. The district also projected needing 30 additional staff members for nutrition services ahead of the state’s enactment of universal school meals, Solomon said.

Aurora Public Schools doesn’t have a shortage of employees in nutrition services, because Solomon strategically hired a full-time specialist solely dedicated to staffing. If someone isn’t focused on staffing priorities for at least five to 10 hours consistently each week, Solomon said, “then you’re never going to get off what I call the insanity staffing loop.”

It’s important to also think outside the box to address staffing, Solomon said. For instance, Aurora Public Schools has a program that hires high school students to work three hours in the afternoon for school nutrition services. The district also has flexible hiring practices for adults who just want to work a couple hours in the morning or only do a lunch shift.

Solomon added that the district created small cards with QR codes that refer to a website with school nutrition staffing benefits and openings that are then handed out by nutrition employees to help recruit people in the community.

Even when a district is fully staffed, it’s important to keep looking ahead three, six, nine and 12 months down the road, she added. “Sometimes, we get to a point in K-12 where we’re staffed, and we back away from it and you can’t. You have to stay staffing.”