DENVER – About 1,000 freshly minted teachers graduated in Colorado last year with credentials in elementary education.
Genoa-Hugo Elementary school, an hour east of Denver, only needed one of them. But, “they had zero applications last year,” said Robert Mitchell, Academic Policy Officer for Educator Preparation with the Colorado Department of Higher Education. “That is somewhat telling.”
He says some Colorado rural school districts are on the brink of crisis. And even Front Range struggle to fill positions.
Mitchell says Colorado is just not producing enough teachers. This year, enrollments in the state’s teacher prep schools are down 23 percent compared with five years ago.
Math, science and special-ed teachers are especially coveted.
“We fought over a math teacher a couple of years ago with Greeley, and we won,” said Amy Spruce, recruitment and retention administrator with the Adams 12 Five Star Schools district, northwest of Denver. It includes Westminster and Thornton.
“The sheer number of teachers that we need aren’t available so we’ve started going out of state to recruit where there’s a surplus of teachers like Michigan or Utah where they’re just churning out more teachers than they can hire, trying to convince them to come to Colorado,” Spruce said.
Pueblo, a district struggling academically, has brought teachers in out of retirement.
Jack Kronser, interim human resources chief in the Adams 14 district north of Denver that includes Commerce City, has spent 23 years recruiting for schools. He says finding teachers with the right skills is more challenging now.
“We don’t necessarily have the right pool of teachers here so we will go out of state to find those math teachers, those speech language therapists, the minority teachers,” he said. “With a smaller pool of candidates, there are fewer high-quality teachers.”
Why the shortage?
“In the last five to six years, we’ve had several mandates that were truly unfunded, went through a recession, put more on people’s plates and didn’t take anything off,” said Don Anderson, director of the East Central Board of Cooperative Educational Services, which provides services to local member school districts.
Principals and other school officials say that Jefferson County has lost hundreds of teachers because of political turmoil over curriculum.
In several metro Denver middle and high schools at the start of this year, there were still job postings for math and science teachers. That means a last-minute need for qualified substitutes, classes divided among other teachers, and instructional coaches brought in to help teachers handle the changes.
It’s rough in the country
Rural Colorado also has some big hurdles.
Starting pay in many rural districts is around $30,000, or even less than $25,000 in a few. School officials say they can’t compete with Front Range districts. And some northern Colorado districts can’t compete with Wyoming, which pays up to $20,000 more.
When there isn’t a pool of candidates, rural districts often take what they can get. If a candidate just has a general bachelor’s degree, he or she can take licensure classes and get an emergency authorization that’s good for a year.
They also focus on incentives – forgiving student loans, paying for continuing education, or offsetting housing costs.
Garfield County’s School District 16 east of Grand Junction will pay for a master’s degree if a new teacher commits to five years. In the eastern plains, recruiters will pay $4,000 for a two-year commitment to encourage speech therapists and others to get the master’s degree they need to administer and analyze tests, .
At the department of higher education, Mitchell tries to stay optimistic.
But he, like Adam’s Five Star’s Spruce, thinks the shortage will be problem for a while. Spruce says that will persist until perceptions are changed about the teaching profession:
“If everybody realized what they (teachers) had to do, they should be really elevated to that professional dignity of a doctor or someone like that,” she said. “They’re really shaping the future for our state.”
