CSDE: 11 teacher shortage areas for next school year

Connecticut faces a statewide special education teacher shortage for all grades during the 2024-2025 school year. It also faces shortages in other subject areas and grades.

The Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE) recently announced it has identified 11 teacher certification endorsement areas where demand for teachers is higher than the number of teachers available.

Statewide, there is a teacher shortage in prekindergarten (PreK) through grade 12 in the following subjects: bilingual education, special education, school psychologists, technology education, and teaching English to speakers of other languages. There is also an anticipated statewide teacher shortage affecting history and social studies in grades 7 through 12, mathematics in grades 4 through 12, science in grades 4 through 12, and world languages in grades 7 through 12.

Additionally, there are anticipated teacher shortages in high-need districts for school and library media specialists and speech and language pathologists in grades PreK through 12. Districts are considered high-needs if they are an Alliance District or if the percentage of students who qualified for free or reduced price lunches during certain school years exceeded 43 percent.

The shortage areas remain unchanged from the 2023-2024 school year.

According to CSDE, mathematics, bilingual education, science, and special education are priority shortage areas.

The department noted that teacher shortages exist “where significant vacancies exist, where educator preparation programs (EPPs) do not produce enough graduates to meet the needs of Connecticut’s PreK-12 student population, and/or where a disproportionate number of teachers who are not certified in the appropriate field are being hired to teach such courses.”

What’s Behind the Increase

According to a report from January 2023 on teacher shortages produced by CSDE and Boston University’s Wheeler Education Policy Center, while the number of students in the state has decreased in recent years, there has been an increase in high-needs student populations they list as students of color, special education students, students who are English language learners, and students eligible for free or reduced price lunches.

As a result, there is an increased need for teachers to support these populations. The report also notes that data from the state’s teacher job application system “reflects increasing demand for teachers of special populations and general education teachers in key subjects.” It notes there was a large increase in the number of jobs in these areas posted between 2020 and 2021.

But the number of graduates from EPPs has “mostly remained constant or decreased” in recent years. The number of new subject-area endorsements awarded to newly licensed teachers or teachers awarded provisional licenses has also decreased.

The report also notes that the shortages resulting from these trends are greater in high-needs districts.

Shortages are also growing faster in some certification endorsement areas than other.

The number of special education students grew by 16 percent between the 2014-2015 and 2019-2020 school years. Special education also had the most job postings between 2018 and 2021, but the number of endorsements for special education only grew by 3 percent from the 2012-2012 average and for the 2021-2022 school year.

Mathematics had the second highest number of job postings in 2021, with a significant increase in the number of postings for middle and high school teachers over previous years. Demand grew by 45 percent over 2019. However, there has been a decrease in the number of EPP graduates specializing in middle and high school mathematics at the same time, falling around 40 percent between 2012-2013 and 2020-2021.

The post CSDE: 11 teacher shortage areas for next school year appeared first on Connecticut Inside Investigator .