TAMPA, Fla. — The growing need for more teachers continues.
“So many teachers nationally leave between year three and year five,” said Pinellas County Schools Superintendent Kevin Hendrick.
According to the Florida Education Association, the state is fighting one of the nation’s worst teacher shortages and one of the most severe in the state’s history.
That’s why districts across Tampa Bay have used the summer months to fill as many vacancies as possible — between job fairs and community outreach, like in Pasco County.
“There’s just been a lot of effort both at the school level and the district level over the summer to make sure that we are out there in the community and out talking about how rewarding it is to be a teacher and how we need teachers in our district,” said Betsy Kuhn, Pasco County Schools Assistant Superintendent for Support Services.
Districts have tried to get create to recruit and retain.
“You can continue to look for, how do you grow teachers within the district? How do you build up from within?” said Hendrick.
“Our current teachers that we have, they need people to help, you know? It’s a big drain on teachers when you have vacancies, and they’re taking up the slack, for lack of a better term,” said Ray Pinder, Assistant Superintendent of Businesses and Support Services for Hernando County Schools.
In Hernando County, the school board recently approved a program that offers on-the-job bachelor’s degrees to aspiring teachers to create their own pipeline of educators.
Pinder told ABC Action News that the program is already working to fill spots.
“So we also know that in our community there’s barriers. So we felt like there was an untapped pool of people that if we could just offer them something. If we could just figure out how to offer them and take away the biggest barriers that we heard, which was time and money, to progress that we would have a good program,” said Pinder.
“It is a program that I know I’m excited about it; I know our school board is excited about it,” he added.
ABC Action News reached out to school districts to find out what their teacher vacancy numbers looked like just days before the start of the new school year.
At last check, Hillsborough County has 529 openings, Hernando has about 125 vacancies, and Pinellas still needs around 120 teachers.
All of these districts have plans in place to make sure classrooms are covered temporarily, but they’ll continue hiring into the new school year to get more teachers to fill the gaps.
Pinellas officials said this is a priority for them.
“We’ve got to make sure we pay our employees the best we possibly can, and then the conditions need to be so good that they don’t want to leave to go somewhere else. So we’re kind of working on both of those,” said Hendrick.