Elkhart Community Schools food service applicant Nicole Talley, Elkhart, fills out her application during the Elkhart Community Schools Career Fair at the Elkhart Area Career Center in Elkhart Tuesday. Joseph Weiser | The Goshen News
ELKHART — A job fair for teachers?
That’s where Elkhart Community Schools has found themselves amid the teacher shortage.
“We decided that we weren’t able to continue to do the things that we normally would do,” said Director of Human Resources for Elkhart Community Schools Maggie Lozano.
The two-day long job fair focused for its first day on support staff, and this afternoon, the focus will be classified staff, including teachers.
“Our focus at one point was strictly just recruiting but we weren’t getting as many applicants as we’d hoped to because we don’t have many people in the field out there that are looking for jobs,” Lozano said.
Lozano said it’s something the education sector saw trending as early as 2017, but they didn’t anticipate the problem to become as significant as it has, and attributes some of it to COVID-19.
“I think COVID certainly had an impact on the shortage,” she said.
They aren’t alone. “It’s a crisis in the whole state,” said Fairfield Community Schools Superintendent Carrie Cannon. “It’s huge right now… Now we have positions that will remain open for two months — elementary positions that no one is applying to and that’s a scare.”
Elkhart Community Schools averages about 50 teacher postings alone at any given point in time.
“Those postings, we used to be able to have applicants right away as soon as we post them,” said Lozano. “We’d be able to interview and bring them on board. Now we’re finding that we’re not getting as many applicants and that the interest is not as it used to be… We have some that have been open since the school year started.”
Elkhart Community Schools’ Food Services Director Pam Melcher said food service alone started the year with 60 open positions.
“We would have my office, we would be out on a daily basis because our job is to feed the kids,” Melcher said. “We had volunteers throughout the corporation that would come and administrators, paraprofessionals, technology… so many people that came to our rescue during that time. It was mainly for serving, some cooking. It took a village to make sure we could get it done.”
In the past two months, they’ve filled the majority of those food services positions and have just five left to fill.
“We lost a lot of people when COVID hit and were trying to recoup from all of that,” she said. “We just really have had so many applicants and good applicants.”
Schools across the county, state, and country are continuing to have increased struggles attracting and retaining skilled professionals from teachers to paraprofessionals to bus drivers.
“We’ve lost first-year teachers to being a Chic-A-Fil manager or making more money painting and it really saddens me,” Cannon said. “Even with our support staff, I have support staff leaving, classified staff leaving, because they could make over $20 an hour at a Starbucks in Target.”
Teachers aren’t making that. Cannon said her first-year teachers average $41,000 per year.
“I’m seeing teachers graduating with $40,000 to $50,000 in debt now,” she said. “Take for example a beginning teacher who makes $41,000. You take your taxes out of that, and you’re going be left with an estimated $30,000 and you look at that to survive the high cost of rent, housing, everything else, and they’re at the poverty level to get a 4-year degree… I started teaching in 1999 and I had dollar insurance. There’s a lot of things that have changed since then. The number one thing that I see is first-year teachers come to us saying they can’t afford to live because their college debt is high.”
Districts have a say in teacher pay, of course, but Cannon says districts struggle to get the funding, which becomes a part of the district’s operations and education funds, to divide between many things. One facet of determining how much money districts will get is the number of students, the Average Daily Membership. As a small district, Fairfield falls within the bottom 10% based on average attendance for funding.
“When you look at those things in our rural communities that does make a difference in how much we’re getting in from the state,” Cannon said.
But at Elkhart Community Schools, the largest in the county, where there are 11,000 students, the story doesn’t change. Districts still have to decide on what exactly they’ll use the money on. This year, Cannon said, Fairfield Community Schools focused on getting better insurance rates, feeling that they weren’t competitive enough for teachers and classified staff.
The insurance rate improvements didn’t halt the resignations or increase the number of applicants, though.
“We have positions that will be open that we don’t even get anybody who has applied,” Cannon said. “For example elementary positions, you always would have at least five to 10 people apply for positions like that or even more,” Cannon said. “People love to flock to schools of our nature and we’re still seeing the talent pool not there. Schools with our the same structural status usually get more applicants and that’s not been the case.”
Districts are having to get creative to fill positions, pulling recent college graduates and getting them emergency licenses or even splitting duties for their current staff members. At Elkhart Community Schools, Lozano estimates a little under 10% of teachers are working on an emergency license as they work toward receiving their teacher’s license.
“We’ve also paid teachers extra to give their plan time to cover a class,” Cannon said. “We have two positions that we’ve looked at and they’re hard to fill, so we’ve gotten creative within the district, and we’re looking at calling retired teachers and calling every single (college) education department within our area… It’s already hard enough to fill somebody fulltime but now when we have to cover maternity leaves, FMLA, whatever, that’s hard as well.”
Elkhart Community Schools began to focus on retention and incentives by creating avenues that would encourage current staff to stay including compensation increases, paid maternity and parental leave, textbook reimbursement, an onsite clinic, and more.
“We’re not oblivious to the fact that compensation plays a huge fact and we want to make sure that people feel appreciated and valued and we want to display that showing by we are offering wages that demonstrate that they are appreciated,” Lozano said.
This year Elkhart schools negotiated a 7% increase for their support staff but they remain standard with other districts that also saw increases this year.
In addition to finding general education teachers to cover classes, districts must also find specialty teachers in fields not limited to music, art, special education, and more. The Indiana Department of Education released a memorandum in late October indicating a proposed list of shortages in the state based on 2020-2021 emergency permit issuance and long-term vacancy data collected from schools and job bank postings.
According to the proposed list, among STEM, Social Studies, Interventions and Fine Arts teachers, districts across the state struggle to fill career and technical education teaching positions including agriculture, family and consumer sciences, business
and information technology, marketing, health occupations, and trade and industrial.
“We completely support CTE programs and the pathways that the Indiana Department of Education has created for us, however, you can see how many hard-to-fill positions that is. It’s been hard to expand programming because we can’t find certified people to fill that position,” Cannon said.
Lozano added that schools are also aware that not as many people are going into education, suggesting that people don’t value education the same as in year’s past.
“It’s tough, it’s not for the faint of heart, that’s for sure, but I think by building some of the supports and building the pipeline and making sure that we’re collaborating with our local universities to create opportunities for our students now, we can help build that,” Lozano said.
Through the Elkhart Career Center and through Elkhart High School, pathways introduce students to the field of teaching in hopes that they’ll go on to Goshen College’s collaborative program Teach Elkhart County. The first cohort of students are juniors in the college now.
“What I will say, and where I’m hopeful, is that working for an educational institution, it offers some stability and supports within the community,” Lozano said. “Although we have seen a trend in decline of some applicants, we have seen that picking up again, especially for the purpose that we are here today for, which is for our support staff. Working in education, it does seem to provide that stability in the community. We’re not as susceptible to the economic changes. ”
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