Staffing Districts Proves Hard

By Eileen O’Grady THE CONCORD MONITOR
Special education teacher Pat Prescott had just four days left in her job at Franklin High School.

After working there for 25 years, some last-minute paperwork, classroom packing and goodbyes were all that stood between her and retirement. But the closer she got, the more the emotions and uncertainty began to cloud her mind.

“I’ve got everything all set up. My retirement check’s set up, Social Security is all set up, my insurance is set up, everything’s ready to go. And then you feel like ‘Oh … should I?’ ” Prescott said in June at the end of the school year. “Especially when they’re having a hard time finding people to hire. I almost feel like I’m leaving them in the lurch.”

Prescott, 65, retired a little early, about a year and a half before she reached her official retirement age. She said she felt ready.

Prescott’s student caseload, which was once 12 students, had increased to 22 students, and the coinciding time-sensitive paperwork had multiplied as well. She knew as well as any teacher that caring passionately about her job can lead to more stress due to a desire to keep pushing through. But by the end of the year, trying to balance her job with caregiving for her husband, who was experiencing health challenges, became too much.

“I’m exhausted, because the job has become very challenging,” Prescott said. “Our caseloads are big. It’s to the point where it’s such a challenge that I feel like maybe I’m not doing a good job.”

Special education teachers are one of many positions on the New Hampshire Department of Education’s critical shortage list, which is compiled through an annual survey of superintendents about their staffing gaps. Although the list has reduced considerably since 2019, still about half of New Hampshire’s 54 “endorsement areas” are considered critically understaffed.

Prescott was involved in the process of hiring a new case manager for the district, and finding candidates was difficult. Special education is “definitely not an 8-to-3 job,” said Prescott, who would typically work until 6 or 7 p.m. finishing paperwork that she didn’t have time to do during the day while working with an increased number of students. Not to mention that since COVID, a much larger percentage of students on her caseload were considered “high-maintenance,” with extensive needs.

“We didn’t see a lot of appreciation going on for the field, and I think that a lot of people, at the same time, realized how tough of a job it really is and what’s expected,” Prescott said. “I think you are going to see a shortage for quite a while.”

Many school districts around New Hampshire have experienced staffing difficulty, high turnover and trouble hiring within the past three years, due to a mixture of factors, including teachers choosing earlier retirements or leaving for other districts and a seeming lack of qualified or interested candidates for certain subject areas.

While nearly every district has noticed the issue to a certain degree, it’s the smaller, more rural and more low-income school districts that tend to be hardest hit. With school staff in high demand, educators can have their pick of schools, some superintendents say, and frequently opt for higher-paying jobs, leaving lower-income districts with the worst of the shortages.

National Education Association president Rebecca Pringle estimated earlier this month that the U.S. has a shortage of 300,000 educators nationwide.

In New Hampshire, the Department of Education has taken an optimistic view, with a July 19 press release saying New Hampshire is doing better than other states. Educator license renewals are at a decade high this year at 8,350, after dipping to a low of 7,775 in 2020.

“When some areas of the nation are struggling to fill teacher positions, here in New Hampshire the number of educators has increased steadily throughout the past two years,” said Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut. “Since 2020, New Hampshire has had a net gain of about 300 credentialed teachers. Of course, that does not immediately translate into ease of recruitment for our schools, but it certainly signals that we are in a better place than others.”

Between 2011 and 2019, the number of certified educators in New Hampshire decreased by 1,017, from 28,393 certified educators in 2011 to 27,376 in 2019, according to Department of Education data on teacher license renewals. Since 2019, that number has increased by 686, meaning there are about 331 fewer certified educators in the state than there were 10 years ago. This data doesn’t reflect how many of the license-holders are currently working in schools.

A ‘significant impact’

At the beginning of 2021-2022 school year, the Franklin School District was unable to find anyone to fill a tech-ed woodworking position or a Title I reading position at the middle school – the first time in Dan LeGallo’s seven years as superintendent that the district was unable to fill a position. Instead of offering woodworking, the school pivoted and hired a health teacher, bringing back a health curriculum to fill the space.

“We wanted woodworking,” LeGallo said. “It was what we intended to provide to the kids, and without a teacher, we couldn’t offer the curriculum. It has a significant impact when you want to deliver a specific curriculum to kids and you aren’t able to provide that.”

As of last week, Franklin was still seeking to fill five teacher positions for the upcoming 2022-2023 school year, including math, chemistry and social studies, as well as six paraeducator positions.

Between June and August 2021, the Pittsfield School District experienced turnover of one-third of their employees – including teachers, administrators and support staff – according to Pittsfield Middle High School principal Derek Hamilton.

“In a town such as ours in Pittsfield, we are one of the lower-paying school districts in the state, so for us to experience turnover I think is not out of the ordinary,” said Hamilton. “But our turnover rate is generally 10-15%. We experienced nearly double that in the 2020-2021 school year.”

For certain positions, such as math, middle and high school art, and high school science, it was difficult to find replacements. While hiring typically takes place in May, the school was still hiring teachers in late August and early September, even after the year started, which offered little time for prep before classes began. The middle and high school art teacher was hired two days before the start of the school year, and a high school science teacher was hired after the school year had already started.

Even this year, the hiring challenges continued for Pittsfield. In early June, Hamilton’s job postings seeking two high school math teachers had attracted zero applicants after being up for over a month. A seventh- and eighth-grade English teacher position received only three applicants after being posted for three weeks.

“Those positions were posted in late April, early May, and that’s typically peak hiring season,” Hamilton said. “Generally for an open classroom teaching position, May is a fairly competitive time of year for applicants, and we would generally see anywhere from four to five applicants to as many as 10 to 12 applicants. There’s definitely been a smaller candidate pool this year in comparison to other years.”

The New Hampshire Department of Education’s critical shortage list is compiled through an annual survey where school superintendents are asked to provide information on about 54 types of education jobs, whether any of them are open positions, and if they’re having trouble filling them.

This year, about half of the jobs in the department surveys are deemed to be in critical shortage. Some of them are more specialized positions like technology and engineering teacher, business teacher, family and consumer science teacher, but others are core positions like math and English teachers. In 2019 and 2021 that list was much longer: about 50 out of 54 education positions were deemed critical shortage areas.

The demand for staffing can be seen in online forums as well. Bridey Bellemare, the executive director of the New Hampshire Association of School Principals, says the organization’s ListServ, which members use to network, were filled with job postings that principals need filled well into the start of the last school year. This year, it’s been the same.

“People did not have positions filled, whether it was for physics or languages or mathematics. It was tough,” Bellemare said. “If you don’t have those positions, you have to look at reducing program offerings or reducing class sizes. You’re trying to support your colleagues. If you’re on a team or department that is short of staff members, the other colleagues have to brainstorm ways to pick up the slack, and it’s not always that easy.”

As of last week, there were six teacher openings in the Concord School District, including music, first grade, kindergarten and business and five teacher openings in the Franklin School District, including classroom teachers, math, chemistry and social studies. There were three open teacher positions in the Merrimack Valley School District, and two in Weare, for math and art. After hiring 20 new faculty members over the summer, Kearsarge was still seeking one special education teacher last week. There was also one special education teacher position at John Stark Regional and one music teacher position in Bow. Henniker, Hopkinton and Dunbarton are fully staffed for teachers.

When schools experience teacher shortages, the student-teacher ratio changes and schools have less flexibility in terms of what courses they can offer. Teachers are left having to cover for one another, and their workload increases.

Hamilton said it can be also harder for students to build relationships with teachers if there’s frequent turnover.

“If you have that number of people coming and going, you have a larger pool of folks you’re trying to bring up to speed on our practices, our procedures,” Hamilton said. “There’s a higher demand on our veteran staff to share their institutional knowledge on how we work here in Pittsfield. We see ourselves as a very student-centered competency-based model that for some people coming from a more traditional program takes time to come up to speed. That burden sometimes falls on our veteran teachers and administrators to support that learning curve.”

While some school districts haven’t experienced much shortage of teachers, nearly every school district is experiencing a shortage among support staff, especially paraeducators. While not a new problem, those shortage areas have been exacerbated since the pandemic. As of last week, the Kearsarge School District is still seeking 19 paraeducators. At the beginning of August, weeks before the start of school, Concord School District was still seeking 34 special education and instructional aides.

Throughout COVID-19, many teachers have been calling in sick or quarantining, heightening any pre-existing staffing issues.

“You become very creative,” said Winfried Feneberg, superintendent of the Kearsarge School District. “You need to have a staff that is willing to see the greater good and be willing to take on extra work. We have tried to incentivize through a pilot program. When (teachers) give up the planning period, they get a small stipend for subbing in other teachers’ classrooms. But those are more band-aids than anything else.”

A perfect storm

Unlike other professions like food service workers and healthcare workers that saw unprecedented turnover during the pandemic – often called the Great Resignation – education officials say state school districts were spared from massive waves of teachers quitting. The challenge has been finding enough candidates to fill the positions generated by routine turnover.

Experts cite many reasons for the lack of candidates. For many teachers, burnout and exhaustion since the COVID-19 pandemic have led more teachers – like Pat Prescott – to retire early. Increased responsibilities, worsening student behavior issues and short-staffed work environments have been a tipping point for many.

For many support staff members like paraeducators and bus drivers, who are paid the lowest salaries in the district, the job isn’t financially feasible.

“If someone can make $15 to $20 an hour at the convenience store or Dunkin’ Donuts or McDonald’s and we pay about the same for all day long with difficult paraprofessional positions, that’s difficult to sustain,” Feneberg said.

And when wealthier school districts offer more competitive salaries and benefits, it draws employees away from the lower-paying districts, leaving gaps in their wake.

“The opportunity for people to move on to another district that offers a higher salary has been a pull factor for people,” Hamilton said.

At the same time, other experts cite fewer New Hampshire college and university students entering the education field to replace the ones who are leaving.

Data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Title II state reports shows a steady decline in the number of students completing teacher prep programs in New Hampshire, from a high of 1,153 in the 2006-2007 school year to just 580 in the 2019-2020 school year.

These, and other reasons, will be explored in the next three installments of our Schools Under Stress series.

Like many teachers who leave education, Prescott will continue to remain involved in the school district. After retirement, Prescott planned to teach in Franklin’s evening adult education classes, about 15 hours of work per week. After being in the school district for so many years – and attending high school there herself – she wanted a gradual transition into retirement.

“I’m going to miss it a lot,” Prescott said. “I’m not going to miss certain things. I’m not going to miss being so exhausted and stressed. But I’m going to miss a whole lot of things about it. Seeing students achieve? That is just all the payment you could get in the world.”

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