School districts can request an emergency permit for a position if it’s having a hard time finding a licensed teacher.
(WFIU/WTIU News)
Several contentious laws passed in 2023’s legislative session that will affect teachers, including reducing teacher bargaining power.
This comes after teacher shortages reported nationally during the pandemic. More than 2,100 teaching related jobs posted on the Indiana Department of Education’s website this month.
School districts can request an emergency permit for a position if it’s having a hard time finding a licensed teacher for the job. It’s a temporary credential, and the person they hire must make a commitment to get proper training. The license is good for one year and can be renewed.
List of requirements for an emergency teacher:
must make a commitment to add content areas of the emergency permit to their existing license
get an initial practitioner license for the content areas
four-year college degree
4,000 hours of industry work experience, not in the classroom
meet with advisory licenser about requirements
Wallace gets ready for work at his home in Bloomington.
Daniel Wallace worked in a classroom at the Monroe County Community School Corporation before he got job as a special educator with the corporation, using an emergency license. He also took classes to attain a master’s in special education.
“Somebody said, 'Hey, you could get an emergency license, and you can jump right in.' And so I really enjoyed the room, I liked the students, and most of them were returning" Wallace said. "I had already applied to grad school with the intention of going to school for special education. And so it kind of just seemed like perfect timing."
But attending classes at IU’s School of Education and working a full-time job took a toll. And Wallace felt the demands of school took away from his ability to teach.
"I felt like sometimes I had to prioritize grad school over teaching, which, one was really draining," he said. "But two, I felt like it one took away from my ability to teach and also kind of took away from my students as well, because I wasn't able to prioritize being a teacher all the time. And I think that's something that really taxed on me."
Additionally, he said not many grad school classes were offered in the summer, the months when he had the most time to study.
Now Wallace works helping people with learning differences who are living on their own for the first time. He wants to finish grad school eventually. He said emergency licensure is good for paraprofessionals to move up in the classroom but shouldn’t be the answer to staffing shortages.
Paul Farmer, the president for the Monroe County Education Association, said the disparity isn’t fair to students.
“Maybe they're just looking for a job, a different job. And they jump right in it, you know, and they say, 'Oh, I can do this, I can teach.' And then they get an emergency license, and then they jump in, without any background in education, and how to work with students. Many of those I know in several cases, they don't even make it a semester," Farmer said.
He said Indiana saw a record number of people licensed to teach in Indiana in 2019. Currently, more than 228,000 people in Indiana are licensed to teach.
"We got tons of people that are licensed to teach, they just don't want to teach," he said. "So what's happening is, over time, those numbers of emergency licensed individuals has been increasing, and in particular, over the last five years."
He said teaching roles for special education and some more specialized subjects are especially tough to fill.
The shortage is compounded by the fact educators trained in Indiana are down 36 percent since 2014.
Brad Balch, the dean of the Bayh College of Education at Indiana State University, said the issue isn’t new, and is national. But the rise in unlicensed teachers does have real effects on quality of education.
He said a person might a lot of knowledge in an area, but education training makes a difference in classroom success.
“I may have ample content knowledge in the area of mathematics," he said. "But the pedagogical piece is: how do I engage the learner? How do I create an environment for success? Because increasingly we have think about the classroom, not just as a teacher or a student. But it's rather the teaching and learning relationship. And both of those must go hand in hand."
But he said emergency licenses are needed to help meet school needs, and added ISU is making education degrees more accessible by offering different options.
He said emergency licensed and alternatively licensed teachers need support from their school and district to succeed in the classroom.
State data of teachers trained at Indiana universities and colleges. (made with Flourish)
Wallace said he might return to teaching, someday. But he said emergency licensure needs to be more structured.
"I definitely do miss some aspects of my old job, mainly the people and the students. Especially the people in my, the my classroom, I really, I really liked working with them."
Indiana’s teacher workforce has grown by more than 2,800 since 2018.
