School systems throughout Ohio are continuing to grapple with a shortage of both teachers and other workers as school gets back into session. While Northeast Ohio appears to be faring a little better than others, issues still persist.
Cleveland Metropolitan School District is short about 160 teachers, but, through work bringing in substitute teachers over the last several weeks, that number is closer to roughly 60 vacant positions, said Laura Mulvaney, executive director of strategic staffing for CMSD.
“Which is pretty good when you’re talking about 3,000 teachers,” Mulvaney added.
But the school district is short in several other important areas: secretaries and cleaners. Meanwhile, Scott Stephens, a spokesperson for Shaker Heights Schools, said his school system is in desperate need of bus drivers. Angela D. Carter, recruitment and retention manager for Akron Public Schools, said they’re in a similar situation to Shaker Heights.
Mulvaney said it’s a challenge for schools to keep and recruit employees in some cases because jobs are plentiful currently, and wages have increased significantly recently in the private sector.
“It’s hard to keep up with jobs that are transferrable to other industries where the wages have moved (upward) very quickly,” she said.
Akron Public Schools are also scrambling to find enough staff to fill roles in several other important areas. Carter said the district is seeking paraprofessionals and intervention specialists (commonly referred to as teacher aides and special education teachers, respectively), but also teachers in physical education, foreign languages and career technical education. The district has 62 open teaching positions, according to a spokesman.
“I think some people are just leaving education and finding other professions,” Carter said.
Similarly, Mulvaney said most of CMSD’s teacher vacancies are physical education, music and art.
More broadly, in Ohio and across the country, the number of teachers has dropped significantly over the last two decades, according to a July 2022 report from a task force on the issue with the American Federation of Teachers.
About 300,000 teachers were leaving the profession each year even before the stresses added by and since the pandemic, and the report lays the blame on several factors: low pay and inadequate resources in the classroom; a lack of school support staff to help children with mental and emotional needs; and attacks on academic freedom from conservative state legislatures.
“It’s hard not to be stressed when you’re worried that you’ll be fired for teaching the basics about why the Civil War happened, or when you wonder if you can even teach what happened in May when a murderer, whose racist intentions were obvious, killed 10 people in a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y.,” the report reads.
Shari Obrenski, head of the Cleveland Teachers Union, which represents all of CMSD’s teachers, said stressors of the pandemic didn’t help recruitment or retainment of teachers.
“The shift that we had to remote teaching, then last year when we came back, it was extremely stressful,” Obrenski said.
Obrenski gave kudos to the school district for being able to keep its staffing levels high for teachers this year. Mulvaney said CMSD over the summer worked with several partners, including Cleveland State University, to find qualified people with degrees and walk them through the process of getting a teaching certificate.
But Obrenski said keeping adequate staff levels will likely be an ongoing challenge for all school districts unless “stresses on the system” are addressed.
“Whether it’s pay issues, respect, working condition issues, or being able to recruit enough new folks to help stem the bleeding that we’ve had of folks that are leaving the profession, whether through retirement or other reasons,” she said.
