23 August 2023
WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) – The nation has been hit with teacher shortages, and Kansas is no exception.
“I’ve had an opportunity to sit down and talk to a lot of my colleagues at other school districts, and it is tough right now,” USD 259 Wichita chief human resources officer Sean Hudspeth said. “It really is.”
Hudspeth says they still have about 100 open positions, but that is similar to the last few years. For the school year, they filled 380 teaching positions, with over 50 of those being in special education.
To fix the problem, they have over 100 long-term subs.
“That could mean that we either didn’t have a teacher for that hard-to-fill classroom such as math or science,” Hudspeth said. “But it also means that somebody could be out on medical, military, or even maternity leave to be starting the school year.”
Over the summer, they spread the message of their teacher need and district benefits by traveling 1,100 miles and putting advertisements on platforms like Spotify.
Hudspeth says the amount of open positions this year is less than what it was the few years following the pandemic because they saw many people retire early.
USD 259, along with the Hutchinson school district, started engaging staff throughout the year.
“We’re engaging them early to find out what it is that they want to see out of their career in an education field,” Hudspeth said.
Krystal Young, the deputy superintendent and director of human resources at Hutchinson Public Schools, says they spent a lot of time over the summer recruiting.
USD 308 Hutchinson filled all their K-12 teaching positions, but they still have three Head Start positions open. Right now, there are 10 Head Start classrooms open, and they hope to have the other three up and running with teachers this fall.
They are also looking for custodial and food service staff and over 20 classified staff members, such as paraeducators.
The Hutchinson school district hired 49 new teachers this year and 120 new staff members. Fifty-four percent of the staff has served the district for five or more years.
To help recruit, USD 308 has partnered with three different colleges. Students can student teach in the district and join the district when they graduate in December.
Young says the number one priority is to provide the best educational experience for the students. She says that takes creativity.
“As we start the year, we are going to have to be flexible,” Young said. “Our building principals will make sure that students have what they need, and so there might be some swapping around and moving around and everybody filling in the gap, taking on maybe some extra load until we get all those positions hired.”
In Dodge City, they had over 50 certified staff positions to fill, which is more than normal. They filled all but a handful.
“We’ve made a lot of phone calls. We’ve called up a lot of retired teachers,” Dierksen said. “We’ve called up a lot of people that have the potential of being certified. And I do want to say this, the State Department has been very positive to work with. And they understand that there is a dilemma across the state, and they’re working with us.”
The superintendent of Dodge City Public Schools, Dr. Fred Dierksen, says their human resources department has also been working extremely hard to get that done.
“We have apprenticeship programs, we work with several universities, we offer up to $2,000 a semester for eight semesters to provide students to get fully certified, and we’re trying about everything we can think of,” Dierksen said. “The real secret is we’re doing everything that every other district is doing.”
In Deerfield, they formed a committee on teacher shortages last year. They have one open position.
The district plans to implement a new method of staffing.
“If we don’t try to do something different, if we don’t try to staff our district differently, if we don’t look at the way our teachers work together and support one another differently, then we’re as big of a problem as anything else,” Tyson Eslinger, Deerfield superintendent, said.
He hopes their new team approach will help with recruitment and teacher support.
“A group that is working together, and you have those groups of kids, then they can be that support and help support one another, and they don’t have to be everything to every kid every single hour of the day,” Eslinger said.
The team method would be picking a group of kids and putting a team together, such as math, English, science teacher and a para.
“We have to stop showing up every year and expecting to do the same thing and expecting it to be different,” Eslinger said. “We have to be willing to be different.”
The team aspect, he says, will allow teachers to support one another throughout the day.