The Latest from VEA

Every child in Virginia should be able to count on a school bus picking them up on time, administrative staff to greet them in the morning, a hot meal at lunch, and a qualified teacher in every class. Yet, due to years of underfunding coupled with increased stress and demands over the pandemic, our school staffing shortages have reached a fever pitch – around 10,500 job postings statewide across all school divisions as of August 11th. This means not every student will be guaranteed the basics so many of us were afforded in school. Virginia lawmakers have long understood the troubling trends for staffing shortages, and this crisis ultimately is a product of choices they made to under-resource our schools. More than ever, we need state lawmakers to acknowledge the scale of the problem before them, double down on providing competitive compensation, begin adequately staffing schools to improve working conditions, and pass policies and change their rhetoric to show respect for educators. 

While we won’t get official state vacancy numbers from the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) until next year, our next best option to get a sense of statewide shortages is from job posting data on school division websites. VEA pulled the jobs posted across all 132 school division websites over August 10 and 11, and found exactly 10,499 positions, many of which are instructional. While not an apples-to-apples comparison, VDOE reported that on August 15th, 2021, Virginia school divisions had 4,977 instructional vacancies. This comparison comports with what is being reported across the state and nationally by school leaders: that they anticipate significant staffing shortages at the start of the upcoming school year.

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Teacher shortages have been found to have negative impacts on student achievement and lead to overall staff instability at schools. Schools with shortages often will put substitutes, novice, and unqualified teachers in classrooms, and studies suggest this is more likely to happen in schools with a greater share of students of color and who live in households experiencing poverty. VEA analysis of the most recent state vacancy data found divisions with the highest share of Black students have an average teacher vacancy rate more than four times that of divisions with the lowest share (5.5% v.s. 1.3%). Similarly, divisions with the highest student poverty rates had nearly twice the teacher vacancy rate compared to divisions with the lowest poverty rates (5.3% v.s. 2.7%). The findings are particularly worrying considering the fact that Black and low-income students already faced significant barriers to learning in Virginia before the pandemic, and state testing data indicates these groups lost significant ground over the past two years.

Many school divisions have been contingency planning for staffing shortages, preparing to combine students into larger classes or settings like gymnasiums where adults can safely monitor them. Other divisions are reporting hiring more individuals for teaching positions that do not meet full qualifications. All these methods of triage end up depriving students of the services and instruction they desperately need to recover from the lost learning time over the past two years. Elected officials need to boldly intervene at this moment to safeguard public schools and set us on a different trajectory. 

State lawmakers should begin to address our worsening staffing crisis in the upcoming state budget and through other actions, including:

1. Increase teacher and staff compensation so that it reaches the national average and becomes more competitive with neighboring states that pay significantly more. Virginia teacher pay has never surpassed the national average and will degrade over the coming year in many divisions when accounting for inflation. Lawmakers have appropriated for the state portion of a 5% salary increase for school staff this year and next. When inflation is accounted for, even if divisions accepted this full match, it’s not clear if staff would even see an increase in their spending power or if it would decline. Our elected officials can account for high inflation and provide a real 5% salary increase next year that will actually make salaries more competitive for attracting and retaining school staff. 
2. Fully lift the “support cap” which was put in place in the wake of the Great Recession to reduce state spending on school support staff positions (i.e. counselors, nurses, food staff, bus drivers, librarians, custodians, etc.). School divisions that have high vacancy rates today saw a significant reduction in critical support staff positions over the past decade. People in these positions assisted with meeting basic needs of students and breaking down barriers to focus on learning. This cap led to more stress on teachers, as they had to wear more hats and increasingly play the role of counselor, social worker, nurse, etc. for their students. Lifting the support cap will decrease teacher and other staff burnout at all schools and also free up local dollars to meet a higher salary match from the state. The freeing up of local revenue is a key reason that increasing teacher and staff pay should go hand-in-hand with lifting the support cap. 
3. Increase support for “grow your own” programs to educe the financial barriers to becoming a certified teacher. Many other states are investing heavily in these programs, which often include covering all or a portion of tuition in teaching preparation programs for a commitment to teach in a high-need school for a minimum number of years. Virginia is dabbling in these programs, investing nearly $9 million over this year and next, but many other states are investing heavily in scaling these programs and other pathways to develop a strong pipeline of new teachers committed to teaching in their states. A study by Learning Policy Institute found that “positive outlier” districts in California that had strong student achievement growth over recent years were more likely to have robust grow your own programs. Virginia has generally trended downward over the past decade in the number of students completing teacher preparation programs, like most other states, and unless this trend is reversed, we will be competing for a dwindling state and national supply of teachers in the future. Now is the time to invest in these programs so we can protect and grow the supply of teachers, and ensure the next generation of Virginia students are guaranteed a fully qualified educator in every classroom.
4. Protect educators from politicized issues to reduce stress and burnout. In a recent RAND survey, nearly half of teachers noted that political issues and related opinions have been a source of stress this year, and the majority believe that there should not be government restrictions on classroom conversations about minority and marginalized groups. Governor Youngkin could address this issue immediately by putting an end to misleading rhetoric around critical race theory, which is not taught in Virginia public schools, and by removing the snitch line he set up on his first day in office for people to report teachers who might be discussing “divisive concepts” in their classroom. This type of rhetoric and policy action has led to harassment of teachers and school staff nationally and contributes to additional stress and burnout from the profession. Many teachers feel disrespected in Virginia and are pursuing other careers with far less stress and higher pay. Elected officials have a platform to change the tone of public dialogue around education and should use it to focus on how to improve student outcomes, not cultural wedge issues that only seek to divide us.

Our teacher and staff shortage in Virginia didn’t randomly happen overnight, it’s been years in the making. Choices to underfund schools by state lawmakers have created crisis-level conditions for many schools and will take years to correct. Virginia lawmakers must act boldly to invest in K-12 over the coming year to reverse the troubling trend of more and more educators leaving, or never entering, the profession.