Officials Debate Coming Teacher Shortage

By JESSICA M. KARMASEK

DAILY MAIL STAFF

Teachers’ unions in West Virginia contend there is a shortage of teachers on the horizon, citing the upcoming retirement of a bunch of baby boomers and low pay dissuading young people from joining the profession.

Some higher education officials remain skeptical of any impending shortage, despite a decreasing number of education graduates at some colleges around the state.

Rosalyn Templeton, executive dean of Marshall University’s College of Education and Human Services, said she was given the same speech as a college student in the 1980s.

“Talk of all these teachers leaving has been hanging around for a decade,” she said. “I haven’t seen it. I keep hearing about it.

“I remember when I went into education in the 80s, they were saying the same thing. I was being told there was going to be a large number of retirements, a lot of positions.”

Teachers’ unions say the impending exodus of educators will leave a severe void in the state’s public schools.

West Virginia Education Association President Charles Delauder said he predicts 10,500 teachers will retire in the next five years.

He echoes fears expressed by other union officials that there will not be enough future teachers or in-state college graduates to fill those open spots. Recruiting from surrounding states will prove even more difficult, he said.

“It becomes the position of the higher education institutions to come up with a plan to get folks to go into education,” Delauder said. “But it really falls on the people in state government to be the ones to deal with the problem.”

Delauder and other lobbyists argue that if lawmakers would increase teacher salaries the profession would be more attractive.

“As we’ve been saying all along, the beginning salary is not enough to attract people into education,” Delauder said. “If the state could increase teachers’ salaries, make it more attractive, then we might have a better chance of recruiting and attracting teachers in our state.”

The state is now paying beginning teachers about $30,000 a year.

At Marshall, there has been a significant drop in the number of teacher candidates graduating from the university, Templeton said.

She said the education school is producing far fewer teachers than it was five years ago.

For example, in 2005, 203 teacher candidates graduated from the university. Last year, the number of education graduates dropped to 161.

Templeton cites a lack of marketing about education programs and low salaries in the field as reasons for the decrease.

“The main reason is salary,” she said. “Educators are just not making the level of salary desired. Some say they’re not attracted to the profession because of social challenges in classrooms today. I hear a lot of people say that. A lot of it is that we haven’t really gotten out there to show and market education.”

Marshall administrators say they don’t have any projections for how many education graduates the school might produce in any year in the future.

Templeton said it might help to gather the data and try to forecast, given the growing talk of more teachers retiring from the profession, she said.

“We do have a lot of baby boomers getting older,” Templeton said. “And a lot of people are talking about what we’re going to do.”

Still, she said she remains somewhat skeptical of so many teachers departing the profession.

She believes many more teachers are working more years for financial purposes, or out of boredom.

“Now individuals are saying, well, I’m supposed to retire, but I think I’m going to keep working,” Templeton said. “Look at my faculty. The oldest faculty member I have is 76. Another faculty member is 74 or 75. Another just turned 70, and I have several in their 60s.”

At West Virginia University, the number of education graduates has remained fairly steady in recent years, ranging from 300 to 350.

University officials said they expect the number graduating this year to reach 352. That includes students in the five-year teacher education program, and those who are graduating from the music education, special education, physical education, art education and agriculture science education programs.

Anne Nardi, dean and professor at WVU’s College of Human Resources and Education, expects the number to remain steady in the next few years.

Unlike Marshall, WVU is able to forecast the number of graduates based on the number of students in current programs. They say they can project three to four years into the future.

Nardi said the salary scale and the state’s current teacher seniority system, which often results in graduates having to wait for certain job openings, can make it difficult for in-state graduates to find a job in West Virginia.

“For a graduate who may have student loan obligations, it is imperative to locate a position as soon as possible,” she said. “That, coupled with better salaries offered in most other states, often results in individuals leaving the state.

“Unless the salary situation is changed, in all probability graduates from West Virginia colleges and universities will continue to leave the state even if the number of teachers graduating were to increase exponentially.”

Templeton said if teachers’ unions are correct and 10,500 teaching jobs open up in the next five years, it will be hard to staff schools, especially given her university’s present graduation figures.

A survey released last month by temporary staffing agency Manpower Inc. says nationwide, employers counted teaching as one of the three hardest jobs to fill in 2007.

According to the survey, experts are forecasting a need for hundreds of thousands more teachers over the next decade. That, combined with the prospect of current teachers retiring or leaving the profession, could create big problems in education.

George Jackson, a national spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers, said in an article published by MSNBC.com last month he thinks it has long been difficult to recruit and keep teachers in districts where poverty, crime and behavior problems are rampant. That’s partly because of wages, he said.

But teachers in those areas also complain they don’t receive enough support and professional development.

He noted that at least 40 percent of all teachers leave the profession within their first five years.

Carol Hamric, human resources director for Kanawha County schools, said recruiting teachers is hard work these days.

“I’ve been doing recruiting for about 15 years now, and it’s the toughest recruiting I’ve ever done,” she said. “I try to sell the area, the cost of living, the benefits, but it’s hard – and I used to do recruiting in the corporate world before this.”

Hamric said a fourth of the county’s workforce could retire right now. That includes teachers and other school employees such as cooks and custodians. They have the years of service and the age, she said.

Some have decided to continue working because Social Security benefits have changed, raising the age at which a person is eligible to receive full benefits, she said.

But she said it’s only a matter of time before those employees leave the workforce.

“It’s going to happen,” Hamric said. “It’s going to happen all over the country. And there’s no way the in-state colleges are going to meet our demand.”

Still, applications from aspiring teachers flow steadily into the Kanawha school board offices.

Hamric said earlier that for the past two years, the board has received about 190 applications each month.

The problem, she noted, is finding applicants qualified for specific positions.

New federal No Child Left Behind standards have made it difficult to find highly qualified secondary teachers in critical areas such as math, English and special education, Hamric said.

“It’s getting really hard in some states, and it’ll probably only get harder here,” Hamric said.

Contact writer Jessica Karmasek at jessica@dailymail.com or 348- 1796.

(c) 2007 Charleston Daily Mail. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.