(Ethan Burks, WFIU/WTIU News)
The sound of lockers slamming and students’ voices will soon fill the hallways as another school year begins around the state.
But many schools won’t have as many teachers for those students as they need. One look at the Indiana Department of Education’s “job bank” website tells the story. There are more than 3,000 open staff jobs – nearly 2,000 of which are for teachers.
And that’s just the schools that are reporting data.
“There’s been a lot of people who would have been in the profession, maybe not even as a teacher, maybe an aide, a para, a bus driver, a cook or even just some of our volunteers,” said Paul Farmer, the president of the Monroe County Education Association, which represents more than 800 teachers. “And they just decided either during the pandemic or after the pandemic, you know, I’m just not going to do that anymore.”
He said unlike much of the state, MCCSC, which starts classes Wednesday, has just a handful of open positions, which is normal at this time of the year.
“Sometimes we’ll have a few specialty positions that it may take into August before we’re able to fill everything up,” Farmer said.
Along with the fallout of the pandemic, where teachers had to deal with teaching remotely and hybrid schedules while under constant pressure from the realities of the coronavirus, the political climate in the state plays a factor.
Farmer points to this year’s controversial school curriculum bill, which he testified against at the Statehouse. It passed in the House before dying in the Senate.
“Especially that clause that you can’t talk about uncomfortable conversations,” Farmer said. “You want to go, really, the way you grow is by questioning your own thoughts, questioning your own beliefs.
“That’s the process of learning, and we do that throughout our entire life.”
The state’s last publicly elected secretary of public instruction said the problem with attracting and retaining teachers in the state goes back a while.
“Indiana's really struggling in particular, because I believe 15 to 20 years of rhetoric that was very anti-education, anti-public education, anti-educator, in addition to some really questionable policies over decades, and the lack of funding,” Jennifer McCormick said. “So, it’s really a combination of a lot of things that are driving this huge crisis.”
McCormick was the state superintendent from 2017-2021. The position was abolished and replaced by a secretary of education that is appointed by the governor.
A Republican when in the position, McCormick has switched her political affiliation to Democratic and has been outspoken against the legislature for things such as the failed curriculum bill and calls to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools.
“It goes back to they’re just making things up,” McCormick said. “In Indiana, we do not teach Critical Race Theory. It’s just a national piece that a lot of people in organizations that are pushing the privatization of education hooked on to.
“The Critical Race Theory piece is very unfortunate, because we have real issues to address versus those that are just, at this point, being made up.”
Farmer said the reasons MCCSC isn’t facing the same teacher staffing issues is due to the local community and its willingness to fund increases for teacher pay and extracurricular activities.
He said the school corporation has been able to increase teacher pay, thanks to referendums passed in 2010 and 2016 that generated nearly $17 million.
The school system is asking voters to pass another referendum this fall that will raise $15 million and give teachers an additional $4,500 annually.
“In the fall of 2015, our starting teacher salary with a bachelor’s (degree) was $32,000,” Farmer said. “If the referendum passes this year, the starting salary, once ironed out, is going to be $50,000. We’ve done that in seven years and that’s incredible. We’ve only been able to do that because of the support of our community.”
Statewide, the average starting salary was just over $38,000 for the 2020-21 school year, according to the National Education Association. The average salary that year for MCCSC was $53,000.
Farmer cited a wide variety of extra-curricular activities that benefit the school system. The referendum would also allow $1.2 million to go to special education, performing arts, and STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.
“The only way you’re able to offer these kinds of programs is through special funding,” Farmer said. “And, again, I’m not waving and tipping my hat to the state.”
Farmer did say that while the starting salary at MCCSC has gone up significantly, the top end of the pay scale hasn’t.
“Our focus has been on those first five years because, nationally, in the national database of public educators, it’s well-known research that over half of all teachers leave the profession after five years and we just can’t have that,” he said.
While MCCSC doesn’t have that many open full-time positions to worry about, having enough substitute teachers – or “guest teachers” as Farmer refers to them – remains an ongoing issue not just locally but nationally.
And the impact is not just on the one classroom that is left without a teacher for that day.
“Take, for example, a kindergarten class, and we might have to take that kindergarten class and split it up and give five kids to this classroom, 10 kids to this classroom and so on,” he said. “And therefore, you're actually impacting three classrooms, maybe four classrooms instead of just one. And then of course, those teachers get a few extra kids.
“Or in some case, you might have a teacher that has an aid that's in their class. And so therefore, we got to take that aid out, you’ve got to be over here today. … So, you know, we do what we have to do to cover the class for the students for the teacher that's gone.”
Farmer said MCCSC has to replace anywhere from 85 to 100 teachers on average every year. Some of that is due to the transient nature of Bloomington because of Indiana University.
“We're trying to build up our programs, like our mentor programs, obviously salary, trying to boost those up to encourage people to stay, and so on,” he said. “So, we're doing all sorts of things to make it more of a family make it more of wanting our teachers to feel welcome. And that we support them, that we're here for them, which hopefully, they want to stay.”
