The Northside Independent School District welcomed hundreds of new teachers to the district Monday for two days of training and orientation.
So far, about 650 new teachers have joined the district for the 2024-2025 school year, a sign that recruitment efforts at San Antonio’s largest school district are yielding more fruit this year than the year before.
Northside is the fourth largest district in Texas, with about 100,000 students.
“We're still working to hire approximately 200 teachers, and so in the scale of 6,500 teachers throughout the district, we're in a much better position this year than we were last year, but we've had to take some really aggressive recruitment options,” Northside Superintendent John Craft said. “Referral stipends; we’re paying for alternative certification pathways.”
Craft started off the district’s New Teacher Academy on Monday morning with a speech to about 300 new secondary teachers.
He told them the most important thing is to build a relationship with their students. “We've known, and science has indicated, that it's really about that relationship that is built very early on in the school year for students to be able to learn and build that bond with teachers,” Craft said.
Craft also told the new teachers to lean on the veteran teachers assigned to be their mentors. New hires who were part of Northside’s teacher residency program had an early chance to build relationships with mentors.
Danyelle Foster, a new U.S. history teacher at Brennan High School, and Priscilla Padilla, a new English Language Arts teacher at Rayburn Middle School, were both part of the residency program. They said spending a year in the classroom under the guidance of a veteran teacher helps them feel more prepared to teach on their own.
"I got to keep that connection with my students throughout the whole school year," Foster said. "It was a lot easier to go into actual teaching with my mentor teacher also, because she trusted me already [by the spring semester]."
“I know exactly what I need to do as soon as I go in there. I know exactly how to plan and if it wasn't for the time that I got during the residency program, I don't know what I would do,” Padilla said. “I'm very excited. Of course, I'm a little nervous. I feel like I'm a bird with its new wings.”
Padilla recently graduated from Texas Tech University. Foster was enrolled in the residency program through the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Craft said Northside had slightly fewer teacher vacancies to fill this year compared to last year, and they’re spread out across the district’s many campuses. But he said special education teachers continue to be especially hard to find. About half of the district’s 200 remaining vacancies are in special education, and Craft said many of those positions are for self-contained special education classes.
Special education was a hard area to fill before the pandemic, but Craft said it is harder now.
“We're not seeing the individuals apply with the appropriate certifications, and so that's something that we may look to the state — to our legislators — to try to help us in the future, because these are increasingly difficult positions to fill.”
And despite being in a better position than last year, Craft said the teacher shortage is not over.
"I wish that we could curtail the vacancies overnight, but I think that's going to be a challenge that we're going to have to navigate very strategically for years to come, unfortunately,” Craft said.
