While the number of teachers who have been going into the profession in Ohio is declining and school districts have said they are seeing fewer applications, most districts have enough teachers. There are some niches that are harder to find, though, including special education and science.
“With a smaller candidate pool, we are competing with other districts for the same applicants,” said superintendent Brian Kuhn at Clark-Shawnee Local School District. “I want anyone considering a job in public schools to understand how special schools are and the incredible impact school employees have on the students and communities we serve.”
The reputation of kids as being badly behaved and comparatively low pay for some positions, along with special licenses required, are among the reasons why districts say staff for some positions can be harder to find.
Paraprofessionals
Like other industries, schools are struggling to fill lower-wage jobs.
This includes paraprofessionals who work with students who need additional assistance. Ohio has a permit for these employees but they only need a high school degree.
That means districts are competing with places like Costco and Amazon to get employees.
Districts have been offering other perks, Cox said. For example, at the Montgomery County Educational Services Center, high-quality paraprofessionals can qualify for tuition reimbursement after three years, and they’re encouraged to become teachers.
Springfield paraprofessionals are required to have a higher qualification than some other districts, including an associate degree and a pass score on the Para test. The district has begun offering those tests onsite, school spokeswoman Jenna Leinasars said.
“Additionally, the District’s Federal Programs Department, which oversees the district’s grant funding, now holds and funds classes to prepare any interested adult student for the paraprofessional test,” she said.
Kenny Jones, the president of the Ohio Association of Public School Employees Local 643, which represents Dayton Public Schools paraprofessionals, said one of the reasons it’s hard to keep paraprofessionals is the low pay.
In DPS, paraprofessionals often go on to become bus drivers or teachers, depending on what part of the district they work in, Jones said. Either way, that person is likely to make more money.
Jones said DPS helped its staff by raising the number of hours worked to eight guaranteed hours a day. That meant the pay rose too, he said.
Dayton Public is paying some paraprofessionals $18 per hour, according to the hiring documents on the district’s board agenda.
Terry Graves-Strieter, Greene County Educational Service Center superintendent and a former special education director, said more districts hired paraprofessional and special education staff post-pandemic as more kids had difficulty regulating their emotions after being at home for several months.
She stressed the people who do this work should be ones who love it.
“We want people who know the kind of job that it is and have a passion for those kinds of students who need that extra help,” she said.
Bus drivers
Bus drivers are a challenge because of the circumstances of the job and the requirement that school bus drivers need a commercial driver’s license.
Truck drivers also need the license, and the pay for a truck driver is significantly higher than a bus driver. The commercial driver’s license shortage isn’t expected to peak until 2030, according to industry professionals.
Driving a bus full of other peoples’ kids in traffic early in the morning and late in the afternoon can be more difficult.
The hours are also odd for bus drivers as the day is split between an early morning and mid-afternoon. That means bus drivers are only working six hours a day in a lot of districts, which doesn’t always add up to 40 hours per week.
Vana Beekman, spokeswoman for Greenon Schools, said the one place where the district is not fully staffed was bus drivers. The district recently invited community members to try out driving a bus, she said.
Springfield Schools increased the pay for bus drivers, said Leinasars.
“Currently, this department is fully staffed,” she said. “We credit this to the intentional efforts to increase pay. Since the increase was implemented, the district has had little to no turnover in this department.”
Doug Palmer, senior transportation consultant at the Ohio School Boards Association, which works with public school officials across Ohio, said the lack of bus drivers, along with the requirement that public schools bus the kids that live in their district to and from private and community schools, has made the shortage worse.
It’s more common to see public schools start earlier or later to accommodate the private school bus times.
Palmer said it’s also more common for districts to pay parents to transport their kids to nonpublic schools or eliminate high school busing.
Palmer noted the bus driver shortage has been ongoing and started even before the pandemic.
“This is not new anymore,” Palmer said. “It’s fallen off the radar, but it’s important.”
Special education
There has been a slight increase in the number of kids identified as special needs.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of kids identified under a federal law meant to provide additional services for them has risen from 13% to 15% between the 2012-2013 school year and the 2022-2023 school year.
According to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, the number of students in Ohio with disabilities jumped from 272,069 in the 2018-2019 school year to 279,546 students in the 2022-2023 school year, about a one percent increase in those five years.
Combine that with fewer teachers going into the profession and it is easy to see why schools may have a hard time attracting special education teachers.
Graves-Strieter said exposure is the key to getting more people into special education and intervention services, teachers with additional training to help students who are falling behind.
“When I was a special ed director, we had a peer program,” she said. “Those students who ended up going into that program and helping during their study hall in the special ed resource room, they ended up going into the special ed field.”
Substitutes
Teachers and bus drivers might be hard to find, but the district must find substitutes for those positions too.
Historically, retired teachers stayed involved as substitutes. But there are fewer of those people interested now.
Ohio opened other pathways for substitute teachers during the pandemic when the need for substitute teachers was especially high. Now, substitute teachers only need a high school diploma to be able to work in a school.
Substitutes are often a way into a full-time job, districts said.
“Student teachers and substitute teachers are often the first to apply for a teaching job after having had a positive experience in the school district and forming relationships with staff and students,” West Carrollton spokeswoman Janine Corbett said.
Staffing changes
Springfield hired more people during the pandemic with the added COVID-19 dollars, Leinasars said. But those COVID-19 dollars are ending in September and the district reassessed some of those staffing needs, she said.
The district still has a little over 1,000 employees, she said.
Clark-Shawnee has also seen a slight increase in staff, though the district said overall it is about the same as pre-pandemic, Kuhn said.
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