Schools feel teacher-shortage strains as 2024 academic year kicks off

Uinta County School District 1 Superintendent Ryan Thomas remembers when it was easy to hire teachers and other educational staff from the more populous state just miles away from Evanston.

“We used to hire, I’d say, 95% of our teachers in two huge job fairs in Utah,” said Thomas, who’s been recruiting for the district for three decades. “And now we don’t. We’re lucky if we get any.”

During those earlier days of plenty, Wyoming’s top-tier teacher salaries reliably attracted high-quality educators. But for nearly 20 years, he said, “the Legislature has not changed those base-model salaries, they remain basically the same.”

Meanwhile, Utah’s starting- and top-end salaries have marched up, diminishing and eventually eliminating Uinta’s competitive advantage.

Stagnant salaries are just one factor contributing to the struggles of Wyoming school districts to find bus drivers, meal servers, math teachers, speech specialists and sports coaches.

In districts like Thomas’, which once prided itself on its ability to reel in top-notch teachers, the sting feels acute. The district had 14 vacancies to fill for the school year that started Aug. 26, Thomas said. This wasn’t a huge number, and it had several months to find and hire candidates, yet it came down to the wire.

“We filled our last position last week,” Thomas said just days before the first day of school. “We got very lucky.”

State efforts have sprung up in recent years to improve the situation. But Thomas has yet to see the trend turn around.

“If anything, it’s getting more challenging,” he said.

Wyoming’s path

In 2010, teaching salaries in Wyoming were about 25% higher than salaries in adjacent states, according to a 2022 report by economics researcher Christiana Stoddard. But in the next decade, the state’s average teacher wage didn’t increase much, going from $59,268 in 2012 to $60,650 in 2020, the report states.

Today, Wyoming still exceeds many Western states for teacher pay, but its edge has slipped. It’s ranked No. 26 in the nation for its average teacher salary of  $61,979, according to the National Education Association .

While the Legislature has approved education cost adjustments based on inflation, critics call these bumps inadequate. Districts are unable to supplement salaries enough to remain competitive while still keeping the employee volumes they need, Wyoming School Boards Association Executive Director Brian Farmer said.

“Getting somebody to move to small-town Wyoming is a challenge, and so salary and benefits have been one of the strategies that Wyoming school districts use,” Farmer said. “And so as we have slid down in salary, we see a different [hiring] experience.”

Other factors, like workloads and pandemic pressures, have contributed to erosion of educator stock. A 2022 survey conducted by the University of Wyoming’s College of Education and the Wyoming Education Association found that 65% of Wyoming’s teachers would quit if they could. Rates of exit for new and mid-career teachers in 2023 were the highest the state ever recorded .

“We’re seeing teachers that are leaving the profession, teachers that say, ‘you know what? I’m going to go do something else. This is not worth it,’” Farmer said. Mounting job stresses like dealing with unhappy parents, increasing behavioral challenges in classrooms, long hours and tight resources are among the reasons cited, he said.

On top of that, he added, UW’s College of Education is turning out fewer freshly minted teachers. The college awarded 162 baccalaureate degrees in 2021-22, down from 184 in 2017-18.

“So it’s a perfect storm of conditions of fewer teachers, difficulty in attracting candidates, smaller pools, sometimes less-qualified pools,” Farmer said.

Before she became Wyoming Education Association’s president in July, Kim Amen taught third grade in Cheyenne for 18 years. She encounters one sentiment more than any other when it comes to teacher complaints.

“For our teachers, the vast majority of them really would just like to be respected and trusted as the professionals that they are,” Amen said. “A lot of people talk about teacher pay and teacher salaries, and that is an issue … But that’s not the largest issue.”

Instead, she said, “it’s an unmanageable workload, and the expectations keep going up. There’s no more time in a day to do the things that they’re asked to do, and there’s no support.”

She’s experienced that declining support firsthand. When she started teaching, she said, she had a paraprofessional helping out in her classroom for three and a half hours a day. “And when I left last year, I was lucky if I had a paraprofessional for 30 minutes twice a week.”

Efforts, court challenge

The Wyoming Department of Education formed a 26-member task force in early 2023 to devise recommendations for policymakers and school districts with the express goal of improving staff recruitment and retention.

When the task force asked teachers in a survey to prioritize what would keep them in their role, the five highest-ranked desires were higher salary, stronger administrative support, additional behavioral supports for students, greater respect from students and reduced high-stakes testing.

In August 2023, the task force unveiled a list of recommendations. They included making it easier for teachers to earn credentials incrementally; providing at least one mental health professional and at least one behavior specialist position for each elementary school over 250 students; and providing an ongoing cost-of-living increase for certified-staff salaries.

Some areas have seen progress. The education department collaborated with UW’s College of Education to create a leadership academy, which aims to provide support and training for early-career principals. WDE launched an online portal aimed at making it easier for teachers to find professional development opportunities. A new grant program was established for K-12 mental health services. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder spearheaded the reduction of testing burdens by removing some portions of standardized assessments.

WDE along with the Wyoming Professional Teaching Standards Board also started a program that paves a path for school district employees to obtain a license and a bachelor’s degree.

Compensation and cost-of-living increases will be addressed when Wyoming undertakes the recalibration process for school funding during the Legislature’s next interim session, WDE Chief Communications Officer Linda Finnerty told WyoFile in an email.

Meantime, a district court decision may result in more substantial changes in the way Wyoming funds education. The lawsuit , brought by the Wyoming Education Association in 2022, claims the state has violated its constitution by failing to adequately fund public schools.

Time is of the essence on the matter, the association said in a May press release on the eve of the bench trial: Wyoming is already losing talented education professionals to other states that offer better salaries and working conditions.

The WEA doesn’t anticipate a verdict until late 2024 at the earliest, Amen said.

Consequences

The Wyoming School Boards Association’s jobs page currently lists nearly 140 vacancies, though the number is likely higher as some are for multiple positions. Districts are seeking everything from volleyball coaches to special education teachers, choir instructors, English teachers, custodians and a principal.

Even if a district does fill its openings, Farmer said, that doesn’t mean it secures the caliber of employees it desires. Smaller candidate pools are “inevitably going to affect the quality of pools.”

Back in Uinta County’s School District 1, Superintendent Thomas said the district, which used to receive around 30 applicants for a single elementary school position, this year probably didn’t receive that many applications total for its 14 openings. More than half of 2024’s new hires were Evanston residents who advanced from an aide or other position through an exception authorization in order to be credentialed, he said.

This type of effort is spreading, Farmer said, as districts increasingly support candidates while they finish their education.

Wyoming reported 190 teachers using emergency or provisional credentials and four teachers working outside their licensed subject area for the 2021-22 school year, according to a Learning Policy Institute report on the state of the teacher workforce.

Thomas feels confident in his district’s staff, but said teacher shortages inevitably have consequences, with students bearing the brunt of them. “It’s a shame to see what has happened because of salaries that have been stagnant in Wyoming for 20 years … who’s suffering from all of this is our kids.”

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