Thousands of teaching positions in Pennsylvania were vacant or filled by someone on an emergency certificate in the past year, leaving education across the state in crisis mode, one industry onlooker said.
More than 2,000 teaching positions were vacant in Pennsylvania as of October, according to data released by the state. A December amendment to the school code enabled the Department of Education to collect and release teacher vacancy data for the first time.
Six in 10 of those positions were filled with a substitute teacher, while 40% remained vacant, resolved by teachers covering classes during their free periods or students being assigned to other sections of a course.
In Laura Boyce’s assessment, the state is in a crisis.
“I don’t use that word lightly,” said Boyce, executive director of education support nonprofit Teach Plus Pennsylvania. “In the past decade, the number of certified teachers produced by Pennsylvania’s colleges and universities has fallen by 75%, and teacher turnover is also at an all-time high.”
To make up for the mounting vacancies, a 7.7% annual teacher attrition rate and the more than 6,000 educators employed on an emergency certificate, the state needs about 15,000 more teachers, she said.
That is about three times more than the number of teachers certified in Pennsylvania last year, according to state Department of Education data.
Teach Plus partnered with the National Center on Education and the Economy about three years ago to tackle the statewide teacher shortage, forming the coalition PA Needs Teachers.
The group released a report in February highlighting the extent of the shortage. It was compiled through state data, novel education research and a 2022 summit in Harrisburg of 150 policymakers, educators, higher education leaders, nonprofits and public education advocates.
Pittsburgh ties
But the report did not originate in the state capital. It began 200 miles away in the Pittsburgh Public Schools, said Amy Morton, executive director of the National Center on Education and the Economy.
Pittsburgh-based business consultant Denny Civic Solutions started working with Pittsburgh Public Schools around 2021 to identify inefficiencies and hurdles preventing the district from excelling.
“The one that really surfaced as really being critical to any other policy issue was the lack of adequate staffing — in particular, teachers,” said Morton, who was working for Denny Civic at the time.
It became clear early on that school staffing is a statewide issue, Morton said. Education leaders soon began discussing ways to solve the problem across the state’s 500 school districts.
“We’re not going to solve this one district at a time,” she said. “We have to do something statewide in order to have an impact.”
Shortages moderate in Allegheny, Westmoreland
Schools in and around Philadelphia bear the brunt of the statewide teacher shortages.
Between vacancies and educators working on emergency certificates, Philadelphia County is in need of more than 2,000 teachers, according to PA Needs Teachers data. The county issued about 390 teacher certificates last year, down 31% from a decade ago.
But Western Pennsylvania is not in the clear.
There were nearly 370 teacher certificates issued in Allegheny County last year, a 36% decrease from a decade ago, according to the PA Needs Teachers report. The county needs more than 300 additional teachers and has an attrition rate more than 5%.
Westmoreland County needs 30 more teachers and has an attrition rate of 5%, according to the report. The county issued 94 teacher certificates last year — a 32% decrease from a decade ago.
“It’s not as severe as in other parts of the commonwealth,” Boyce said of the Westmoreland data during a panel discussion at the county intermediate unit building last month. “However, it is still concerning as we think about our future students but also our future workforce and our economic prospects.”
Special education sees most vacancies
Some subject areas are more impacted by the shortage than others, said Ed Fuller, a professor of education at Penn State who contributed research to the PA Needs Teachers report.
Fuller is no stranger to researching the teacher shortage. At 15 years old, he went to the library one day to investigate the topic. That was in 1982.
In 2001, Fuller wrote his doctoral dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin on the distribution of teachers.
Although educators teaching foreign language and high level math and science classes are hard to come by, special education has suffered the most from the teacher shortage.
“I don’t think any district has been able to find a sufficient number of well-qualified special education teachers,” said Fuller, who has been at Penn State since 2011.
Of the 2,150 teacher vacancies reported by the state in October, about 1,000 of those came from special education, he said. The next highest category of vacancies is elementary teachers, with about 320 openings.
“It’s really a travesty that we aren’t providing the types of teachers the state requires for them,” Fuller said. “Those are our most vulnerable kids in the state, and they deserve the best from us.”
There has been a rise of students being placed in special education classes in recent years, Fuller said, but there are not enough teachers to account for the increase.
He suspects part of the increase comes from a greater awareness of neurodiversity and student needs.
Fuller started his education career as a high school math teacher in Taylor, Texas in 1989. At the time, a talkative student who struggled with paying attention in class was just seen as a difficult student.
“At that time, nobody knew and that was on us because he just had a disability,” Fuller said.
Working conditions also may deter people from the field, said Fuller, who argues special education is one of the most challenging teaching positions.
School administrators — who are not required to have a special education certificate — may not understand how to best support the educators, he said. And the job comes with extra paperwork from federal, state and local requirements associated with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
“To me, there’s a moral responsibility — there’s a legal responsibility, too — to provide good special education,” he said.
Fuller said lowering state tuition for students who pursue special education or other hard-to-fill subjects in exchange for three years of work in a state public school could help to address the vacancies.
“It’s kind of…reducing the barriers to becoming a teacher,” he said.
‘Grow your own’
Reducing barriers was just what the Central Westmoreland Career and Technology Center had in mind when it launched its Aspiring Educators program this past fall.
The program exposes high school students to teaching methods, behavior management and a variety of teaching environments with the possibility of receiving college credits — all without paying a dime, said Alexander Novickoff, assistant director of workforce education.
Six of the 12 students who participated this past year were from the program’s host school, Mt. Pleasant Area School District. The others came from Belle Vernon, Southmoreland and Yough.
The program helps students validate their aspiration to become a teacher before college tuition is on the line, said Beth Hutson, assistant superintendent of Mt. Pleasant Area.
“Sometimes it disconfirms their aspiration to be a teacher, so you might lose someone, but that’s a good thing,” she said. “When I was on faculty at (Indiana University of Pennsylvania), I would have adviser sessions with students, and they would be like deer in the headlights: ‘I’m in college. My mom and dad said I had to come. I don’t even know if I want to be a teacher, and I’m paying for that experience.’”
For Angel Carilli, the program came at just the right time.
Carilli, 17, of West Newton, will be a senior this fall at Yough High School. She plans to continue enrollment in the Aspiring Educators program.
“I actually have always been interested in teaching, but then I pivoted away from it for a minute. But I found myself wanting those teacher roles within other hobbies that I have,” she said. “So whenever we were offered to do this program, I immediately hopped on board.”
Carilli volunteers with the children’s groups at her church. She’s always on the hunt for educational activities to do with the two boys she babysits.
She was particularly struck by her experience at Clairview, a Hempfield school for children with disabilities. She plans to study early childhood education and pursue a special education certificate after high school.
The career and technology center accepts students from Norwin, Penn-Trafford, Greensburg Salem, Jeannette, Hempfield, Mt. Pleasant, Southmoreland, Frazier, Belle Vernon and Yough school districts.
The program is expanding to include a second location in the fall, Hempfield’s Stanwood Elementary. This will make the program — which has 26 students registered for next school year — more accessible for students living in the northern areas of the county, Novickoff said.
‘Every step forward is important’
The financial barriers to entering the teaching profession do not just apply to college students.
That’s why the Allegheny Intermediate Unit partnered with Point Park University and talent development firm BloomBoard to help those with associate’s degrees pursue a teacher certificate free of charge.
The BridgeUp program targets paraprofessionals with associate’s degrees who are working in schools, said Robert Scherrer, executive director of the Allegheny Intermediate Unit.
Participants can continue to work their full-time jobs — maintaining their salary and benefits — while moving through a two-year certificate residency-style program at Point Park, Scherrer said. The $16,500 cost per person is covered by the school where they are employed.
The first cohort started this spring. By the fall, about 20 to 25 people will be enrolled in the program, Scherrer said.
Next steps for the intermediate unit — which supports 120,000 students across 42 districts — are to secure funding for schools that can’t afford the cost and expand the program to those without associate’s degrees, Scherrer said.
“I think the one thing I would share is we need to continue to adapt and change,” he said. “So this BridgeUp program is the one thing we’re putting a lot of effort into currently, but we’ll need to start to say, ‘OK, where is the next area that we can push?’
“This isn’t something we’re going to solve in a year. It’s been 10 years in the making, but every step forward is important.”
Quincey Reese is a TribLive reporter covering the Greensburg and Hempfield areas. She also does reporting for the Penn-Trafford Star. A Penn Township native, she joined the Trib in 2023 after working as a Jim Borden Scholarship intern at the company for two summers. She can be reached at [email protected].
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