Teacher shortages impact local districts differently

DAYTON — The new school year has begun for districts across the Miami Valley, but shortages in the teaching department continue to be an issue for local schools.

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Huber Heights School District had to do last-minute shuffling to place teachers in state-mandated positions.

Teachers can often be moved around and not placed in their desired spots, but administrators must fill the mandated openings.

Huber Heights School District Superintendent Jason Enix said it isn’t as easy as it used to be to fill teaching spots.

“You’re still talking about situations where kids are impacted, families are impacted, buildings are impacted, and as I mentioned before, movement around the district to create a filled vacancy does create another vacancy. And maybe in the past that would have been easier to find. It’s not as easy to find today as it used to be,” Enix said.

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Dayton Public Schools is the largest district in the Miami Valley, but they are still trying to fill about 50 openings, mainly for math and science.

Interim Superintendent David Lawrence said the biggest issue the district faces are keeping teachers on board once they’re hired.

“Recruitment is a given but we’re working on retention, you know, how do we make this a space for you to want to be here and stay here? How do we make this as an experience for you as an employee? …These are our ideas around how do we keep employees here? If you keep people and you do a good job of retention, then you don’t have to have this conversation around recruiting and hiring every year,” Lawrence said.

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Both Dayton Public Schools and Huber Heights said developing marketing strategies for hiring is important when the number of teachers continues to decrease.

“It is significant and as you look at some of them even harder to find positions, you know, let’s say at a high school science level, there are fewer and fewer of those, of course, but even at the elementary level, it’s not like it used to be where you might have, you know, 100 plus applicants for a vacancy that that’s not there at this point,” Enix said.

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