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It’s officially back-to-school season in San Antonio. The first few school districts welcomed students back this week, and several more districts start on Monday. But even as school leaders prepare for the promise of a fresh start, they continue to struggle to find enough teachers and other staff.
The Edgewood Independent School District started the school year Aug. 7 with about 30 teacher vacancies. Superintendent Eduardo Hernandez said it’s been especially difficult to find bilingual teachers.
“Most of our needs are going to be in elementary, because the bilingual [teachers], you can't bring them out of thin air. That's a hard one,” Hernandez said.
Hernandez said Edgewood will have larger class sizes and use central office staff to cover classrooms until the remaining positions can be filled.
Last year, after a big boost in teacher pay and a targeted campaign to get the word out about it, Edgewood managed to fill all of its teacher vacancies just before the first day of school. But the West Side school district, like many higher-poverty districts, has long struggled with high teacher turnover.
Hernandez said this year a lot of positions opened up because of retirements.
“We had a lot of teachers that were just honestly holding on. They stayed and stayed and stayed even through the pandemic and after,” Hernandez said.
Edgewood has a pipeline of new teachers through a student teacher program with the University of Texas at San Antonio, but Hernandez said he’s worried fewer college students are studying to become teachers.
“Our [student] teachers talk about friends of theirs who changed [majors] in college,” Hernandez said, adding that it’s especially important to support teachers right now.
“Our teachers are getting put in a very precarious position because of just the narrative coming out of our state capital,” Hernandez said. “The profession's been vilified [for being woke]. “Teachers are being held responsible for things that are out of their control. They're more social context conversations than they have to do with student outcomes, which is what we want to talk about.”
Edgewood itself has been no stranger to culture war controversy. A teacher assigned to a credit recovery program at one of Edgewood’s high schools was placed on leave this week after he posted a photo of his classroom showing a Pride flag hung on the wall.
The district said in a statement that the teacher was an employee of the credit recovery program Learn4Life, not Edgewood, and that Learn4Life was in charge of his employment.
The statement said Edgewood “fosters a diverse and inclusive learning environment that respects the rights and identities within our school community, regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or transgender status,” but that it also “prohibits educators from expressing their personal or political viewpoints” in the classroom, and that a Pride flag is considered a “personal viewpoint.”
Northside ISD
San Antonio’s largest school district, Northside ISD, started out with almost 700 teacher vacancies to fill this summer and is still looking for more than 200.
To help fill some of those vacancies, Northside is using social media to ask retired teachers to come back for a semester or two.
Spokesman Barry Perez said the district wants retired teachers to know that they’re eligible to return after they’ve retired for a year, and that the district will cover the surcharge required by the state.
“We want to honor our commitment to make sure on day one of school we have every classroom covered,” Perez said. “What better resource than someone who is a retired educator?”
Perez said the district will also honor retired teachers’ years of service.
“That can be a big differential in the pay-- if you start at the bottom or if you come back to that rung you were at when you first left,” Perez said. “And so, the individual, in essence, gets their annuity — their retirement. They get their salary from Northside on top of that, and have that job for up to a year.”
Perez said the district has hired 23 retired teachers so far.
Northside’s first day of school is Aug. 28. Two of the district’s elementary schools, Cable and Westwood Terrace, started Aug. 7 as part of a switch to an extended school year.
Perez said the district surveyed parents at the two schools located just north of Lackland Air Force Base to get their approval to move to an 11-month calendar.
“One mom we talked to said, you know, my child's just kind of home for the summer and I have to worry about it when I go to work and is he eating, is he going to be well cared for? And so now that he's at school, he's going to be fed and he's going to have activities. He’s with his friends,” Perez said.
He said the schools will partner with outside organizations to take students on field trips and enrichment activities every week. That will give teachers extra time to lesson plan.
Several other schools in the San Antonio area also have extended school years.
North East ISD
North East ISD, which starts school on Monday, is also still looking for around 100 teachers.
Executive Director of Human Resources Chyla Whitton said the district had 572 teachers resign at the end of last school year — down from the more than 700 resignations the year before, but still higher than the district’s typical turnover.
“Special education and bilingual teachers continue to be a great need. Math is another area that we have had a need to explore hiring teachers and then where we often have a need is also our career and technology education areas,” Whitton said.
To help find enough teachers in their two highest need areas, North East is offering relocation incentives to bilingual and special education teachers who move to San Antonio to work for the district.
“We're all vying for the same candidates when you're right next to the other districts [in San Antonio]. We often all go to the same job fairs,” Whitton said.
“We're also just looking to find experienced individuals who may just be looking for a change. And financially, that might be a challenge,” she added. “So, we thought if this is a way that could help someone with that move and bring them to San Antonio, because we offer so much, then that would be a great way to attract them.”
The relocation bonus ranges between $3,000 and $8,000 depending on how far away the teacher is moving from.
“We have seen some come from the Houston area in particular,” Whitton said. “We've had people come as far as New York.”
Whitton said North East is also continuing to struggle to find enough bus drivers, custodians and cafeteria workers. The district is also offering referral incentives and retention bonuses for those positions.
San Antonio ISD
San Antonio ISD, which starts school on Tuesday, is still looking for about 180 teachers.
Jill Rhodes Pruin, SAISD’s deputy chief of human capital management, said the district had nearly 800 teacher vacancies to fill heading into the 23-24 school year, primarily due to teachers resigning at the end of last school year.
According to district records, SAISD had 442 resignations the year before.
“It's definitely been a challenging year. We have had a higher number of resignations than normal,” Rhodes Pruin said. “We have a large number that are just leaving the profession altogether. And so that's really made hiring a challenge. We just don't have near the numbers going into education that we used to.”
Rhodes Pruin said the number of vacancies in the district fluctuate as new teachers are hired and current teachers quit.
“We didn't have any resignations yesterday. And so that was a great day,” Rhodes Pruin said.
Although much of the conversation around the teacher shortage has centered on pay, Rhodes Pruin said many of the teachers that are leaving the profession tell her it’s about quality of life.
“Some of the teachers we hear from, they're looking for balance in their lives,” Rhodes Pruin said. “Sometimes we hear teachers talk about mental health — they need to take a step back.”
To make sure every class has a teacher on the first day of school, Rhodes Pruin said SAISD created a team dedicated to finding substitutes that can cover those classes. During her interview with TPR on Friday, the live counter on her computer went from 14 uncovered classes to 13.
“We have a team of five that have been on the phone every day this week just calling substitutes, asking them to come in and take a long-term position so that we can keep consistency for our students,” Rhodes Pruin said. “We also are creating a contingency of a group of subs that we will have at central office so that if we have any substitutes that do not show up on the first day, we can quickly deploy a substitute out to a campus.”
Many of SAISD’s substitutes are retired teachers, but Rhodes Pruin said retired teachers can’t be long-term subs because they can only receive their annuity if they work less than half a day or for no more than 20 days in a row. To work around that limitation, SAISD has created some less than half-time positions in special education, middle school, and high school.
Like other San Antonio districts, SAISD’s highest need areas are for bilingual and special education teachers.
Rhodes Pruin said those positions are harder to fill because they have federal certification requirements.
“[Even] if we do something like an emergency permit or a nonrenewable permit or even a waiver for bilingual, they have to complete their tests within a one-year period from the date their permit starts,” Rhodes Pruin said.
Rhodes Pruin said bilingual certification is especially challenging because it has five tests that cost about $1,000 combined.
To help offset those costs, SAISD is reimbursing bilingual permit teachers this year once they pass their certification tests.
