As the number of students coming out of college with education degrees continues to shrink statewide, local school districts are finding new ways to deal with the challenge of recruiting teachers.

“The teacher shortage is an issue we have been dealing with for multiple years long before the pandemic even started,” said Kimberly Kendrick, director of Human Resources at Meridian Public School District.

In 2007, the state Department of Education conferred more than 7,000 teaching certificates. Kendrick said that number had dropped to a little more than 700 only 10 years later.

Not only is the pipeline of new teachers declining, but current educators are leaving their jobs long before they are eligible to draw Social Security. Concerns about working conditions, the lure of more financially rewarding careers and the stress of student testing are all playing a role.

The dwindling number is putting pressure on school districts competing for the same education graduates.

“We deal with teacher shortages primarily in the areas of math, science and special education, which is a trend across the country,” Kendrick said.

“When I started in this field over 20 years ago, it was my life-long dream to be an educator,” she noted. “I started in education knowing that I will probably retire here, but that is not the mindset of a lot of people who enter the field at this point.”

At the Lauderdale County School District, the story is different.

Dr. DeShannon Davis, assistant superintendent over human resources and compliance, said county schools have not been affected by the teacher shortage like some of the state’s other school districts. In fact, the district has a good retention rate keeping employees long term with some retirees having as many as 35 or 40 years of service.

“We generally have around 35 jobs available each year, and we generally do not have trouble filling those spots,” she said.

However, the district does experience problems when a teacher moves once the school year begins or has to take a long-term absence due to pregnancy or an unexpected health reason.

“Finding a replacement that time of year proves to be a little difficult but it is not necessarily due to a teacher shortage. It is just most certified teachers are working by August 1,” Davis said. “If we have any openings prior to Aug. 1 when the doors open, we don’t have trouble filling it.”

The county school district turns to recruitment fairs to find most of its new teachers.

Davis said the school district attends recruitment fairs at all of the central Mississippi colleges to search for prospective education graduates.

In addition, the district has hosted its own recruitment fair one night each January for the past five years. Educators looking to get a job with the county schools can come and drop off a resume and meet administrators from each campus.

“The majority of our new hires over the past five years have come through our recruitment fair,” Davis said. “We usually have anywhere from 75 to 85 participants looking for a job or wanting to come work in our school district. That right there seems to be where we have made our biggest strides. We find our people that night. We take their resume and then we call them and it really works out cause you are putting a name to a ace and you can meet them and see their personality and hear their vision, their dreams, their goals.”

Davis said where the school district is experiencing challenges in hiring is in supporting roles, such as custodial and cafeteria staff and, especially, bus drivers.

“When I was growing up, your teachers were your bus drivers. We’ve kind of gotten away from that,” Davis said. “Teachers are working so hard now from 8 til 3 that adding that extra hour or hour and a half on at the end of the day is not very enticing. We do employ a lot of retirees to drive buses, but I guess that is just one of the areas that we are struggling with right now finding people who can commit to that time of day.”

Over the last several years, the Mississippi Department of Education has been working with school districts to help reduce the number of vacancies in the education system statewide. Some of its efforts to attract new teachers, administrators, assistants and support staff to the eduction field appear to be working.

According to MDE’s 2022-23 Educator Shortage Survey, there were 4,988, or about 515 less, vacancies among teachers, administrators and school support staff across the state than during the 2021-2022 school year. Teacher vacancies decreased in most subject areas but did increase in high school math and science classes, career and technical education and gifted programs. The highest overall vacancies were for teacher assistants and school bus drivers, according to the survey.

While the state has made strides in increasing teacher pay in recent years to help attract more people to the education field, Kendrick said the city school district is focused on retaining the teachers it has and growing new teachers from within the district.

“We are really putting our focus on retention and being able to have teachers supplemented in different ways so they are able to earn more money and at the same time they are able to provide for the district and our students,” she said.

The district is also partnering with the Mississippi State University-Meridian Campus to help put more teachers into classrooms through the Mississippi Teacher Residency Program, which puts individuals who already hold a bachelor’s degree into classrooms as either assistants or lead teachers while they complete their graduate-level coursework to become certified teachers. Each resident is mentored by an accomplished teacher in their school.

In addition, the district is working with MSU-Meridian to help teaching assistants obtain the resources needed to go back to school to become certified teachers.

“We are very strategic about who we hire as teachers assistants because we do want to grow them into a teacher in our school district,” Kendrick said.

They also are working to identify high school students who show an interest in teaching as a career and help them get enrolled in the teacher academy at Ross Collins Career and Technical Education Center.

“We are very strategic about pointing them in the direction of our CTE department at Ross Collins, and we are supporting them,” Kendrick added. “We now have five teachers who have classrooms in our district who came through that teacher academy at Ross Collins. We have invested a lot in growing our own, not only our teacher assistants but also our students.”