As new school year looms, CO school districts look to fill teaching positions

With a new school year on the horizon, school districts across Colorado are looking to fill hundreds of open teaching positions.

But some positions will likely remain unfilled due to Colorado’s ongoing teacher shortage.

As a longtime teacher herself, Brooke Williams knows the struggles Colorado teachers face.

“The job becomes more increasingly more and more challenging every year,” Williams said. “We're asking teachers to do the impossible.”

Williams, who serves as president of the Jefferson County Education Association, says teachers must deal with a lot.

“With growing work class sizes, harder working conditions, mental health challenges, still receiving pay that is inadequate,” Williams said. “Educators deserve to be able to live where they work and many of them cannot afford to do that.”

A state survey shows 9% of teaching positions districts needed to fill last year remained unfilled.

Most of the teacher shortages were in the areas of special education, mathematics, science and early childhood education.

This year, there are shortages in those same areas.

“We're not suffering from an educator shortage, but we're really suffering from an educator deficit because people are not willing to stay in the profession or join the profession,” Williams said.

There is help available for those who are willing to teach.

Denver7

The State of Colorado provides up to $10,000 for people who train to become teachers and who commit to teaching for three years in a teacher shortage area. Many teacher shortage areas are in rural communities.

The Public Education and Business Coalition (PEBC), a Denver nonprofit, has programs to help people become teachers, including one that matches people with teacher mentors.

“We offer a stipend of at least $10,000 for the person to learn alongside the mentor,” said John Kearney, with PEBC’s teacher residency program. “And then based on other stipends that the candidate may qualify for, that can go all the way up to about $42,000."

Denver Public Schools (DPS) said it has 90 open teaching positions to fill, with the start of school three weeks away.

“I think we're sitting in a pretty good place,” said Scott Pribble, a spokesman for DPS. “We're actually doing better than we have in the past few years.”

DPS has two upcoming job fairs. For information on those click here.

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