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 when it comes to finding enough teachers to lead classrooms. Even some urban districts along the Front Range are struggling to fill positions.
Mitchell says Colorado is just not producing enough teachers. So far this year, enrollments in the state’s teacher prep schools are down 23 percent compared with five years ago.
Math, science and special education 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 had to bring teachers out of retirement to fill posts.
Jack Kronser, interim human resources chief in the Adams 14 district just north of Denver that includes Commerce City, has spent 23 years recruiting for schools. He says finding teachers with the right skills is doubly 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.”
“Our political landscape right now – it is extremely difficult to be teacher right now in our state in my mind,” said Don Anderson, director of the East Central Board of Cooperative Educational Services, which provides services to local member school districts.
“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. And so that political landscape has caused people to ask, ‘Do I really want to be a teacher?”’
Principals and other school officials say that Jefferson County has lost hundreds of teachers because of political turmoil over curriculum.
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.
Anderson planned a career fair in Limon last April. Twenty-five rural districts wanted to be there.
“We had three teaching applicants,” he said, so it was canceled.
When there isn’t a pool of candidates, rural districts often hire who they can get. If a candidate just has a general bachelor’s degree, he or she can take alternative licensure classes and get an emergency authorization that’s good for a year.
Cash-strapped rural districts are also thinking they need to focus on incentives – forgiving student loans, paying for continuing education, or offsetting housing costs for teachers.
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