Just as the new school year begins, many Upper Valley schools are finding themselves short on two critical supplies: teachers and support staff.
Reflecting a nationwide shortage of education professionals, schools across the region are scrambling to fill positions, a situation brought about by a wave of retirements of longtime educators and exacerbated by a pandemic set to impact a third academic year.
“We definitely have experienced a teaching — and especially a paraprofessional — shortage due to COVID,” said Amanda Isabelle, superintendent of Mascoma Valley Regional School District, SAU 62, which services the towns of Canaan, Dorchester, Enfield, Grafton and Orange.
With classes scheduled to begin Monday, the district last week was still seeking to fill six paraeducator jobs across all three of its elementary schools.
“We had some late resignations this year, at the end of July, people who said in the spring they intended to come back in the fall,” said Isabelle, adding that teachers left to “pursue other careers,” such as real estate sales.
The district did eventually find enough teachers to replace those lost, which Isabelle characterized as a “miracle,” though she said that was possible only because of people coming into the profession from other careers. Still, the six open jobs loom.
“Paraeducators are critical to the daily operations of the schools and supporting kids academically and behaviorally, so they can succeed,” Isabelle said.
Even so, Mascoma Valley schools appear to be better off than many other Upper Valley school districts where unfilled teacher and staff positions are run into the double digits, according to the employment sections on district websites.
The interstate Dresden School District — SAU 70, which comprises the towns of Hanover and Norwich, currently lists 30 open staff and teaching positions, 13 of which were posted since the beginning of August, including for a French teacher at Hanover High School and two kindergarten teachers at Marion Cross Elementary School.
Meanwhile, the Lebanon School District is listing 23 open positions, nine of them for coaches — mostly JV and reserve — and four for paraeducators and three in facilities or transportation at Lebanon High School but also for a high school science teacher and fifth-grade teacher.
Andrew Gamble, a recently retired social studies teacher at Lebanon High School who was also president of the teachers’ collective bargaining unit Lebanon Teachers Association, said the problem in attracting paraeducators is “it doesn’t pay that well” — $13.55 per hour for uncertified and $14.85 per hour if certified. Substitute teacher pay is now $105 per day.
The Lebanon School District pays uncertified paraeducators at Lebanon High School $13.55 per hour and certified paraeducators $14.85 per hour. Substitute teachers are paid $105 per day for a full day.
“COVID made it difficult to get subs last year. I imagine it will be the same this year,” he said.
The Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union, which covers the towns of Hartland, Windsor, West Windsor, Weathersfield and Brownsville, with one high school and four elementary schools, is listing nine open positions, all of them posted in August.
The Windsor Central Supervisory Union, which spans seven towns from Woodstock to Killington, listed 17 openings across its four elementary schools and Woodstock Union Middle/High School.
The biggest need, however, appears to be the Springfield, Vt., School District, which lists 36 open positions, the vast majority of them for paraeducators.
Two factors, both related to the pandemic, have come together to create an inordinate number of job vacancies this school year, said Jay Badams, superintendent of Dresden School District.
“What we’ve seen is that teachers over the past 18 months have faced the most stress in their careers and some of them who may have planned on retirement in two or three years reassessed their plans,” he said.
(The National Education Association reports that 32% of respondents in a recent survey of nearly 2,700 members said that the pandemic has led them to move up their plans to leave the profession sooner than they had planned.)
“The other thing is we have a pretty significant enrollment increase, especially at the elementary level,” Badams said.
At Marion Cross Elementary School in Norwich, for example, enrollment has increased from 292 students last year to 323 students this year.
Marion Cross, which has had two kindergarten classes, is adding a third because the class sizes are exceeding 20 students.
Enrollment at Bernice A. Ray Elementary in Hanover is up from 464 last year to 492 this year.
“That’s the highest since I’ve been here,” said Badams, who came to the district in the summer of 2017.
Badams said some of the higher enrollment numbers could be attributable to families relocating to the Upper Valley from more densely populated areas during the pandemic, but he cautioned against attributing too much of the growth to so-called COVID refugees.
“We had a remote learning option for families when we started last year, and a decent number decided to home-school but told us they’d be back. And they were true to their word,” he said.
Sherry Sousa, superintendent of Windsor Central Supervisory Union in Woodstock, said the current shortage is part of a systemic shortfall in job seekers across the profession.
“Ten years ago, we used to get 50 resumes for each position. Now we’re lucky if we get 10,” Sousa said, which “speaks to people not pursuing careers in education.”
And then there is shortage in Upper Valley housing adding to the problem.
Sousa said the district has offered jobs to teachers and others who live outside the Upper Valley, but then the applicants “couldn’t find a place to live, so they ended up not moving here.”
That has sent the district to recruit teachers and staff from ever more distant places — three new hires are coming to district schools this fall from the United Kingdom, Spain and Morocco (all are expats or married to U.S. citizens who had been teaching abroad and wanted to return to stateside).
“We’ve posted for positions in places we’ve never posted for,” Sousa said.
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
CORRECTION
The Lebanon School District pays uncertified paraeducators at Lebanon High School $13.55 per hour and certified paraeducators $14.85 per hour. Substitute teachers are paid $105 per day for a full day. An earlier version of this story gave incorrect pay rates for the positions.
