Big Sandy Schools has filled all of the open teaching positions for the upcoming school year. With businesses and other organizations struggling to fill open positions, the public school system isn’t immune from the labor shortage crunch. Kelly Haaland, the superintendent of Big Sandy Schools, replied to my question about how hiring is going with a simple, “We are done.”
When I asked how the hiring process was this time around the reply wasn’t sugar-coated, “It was horrible.” Other school administrators I have spoken with around the state have echoed the sentiment. Kelly’s explanation for the shortage primarily centered around the low inflow of new teachers and the retirement of existing educators. “No one wants to teach anymore, the pay is not that good, the reports coming out of our universities say there are not a lot of kids going into teaching. We’re going through a phase right now where people don’t want to be teachers… Teachers are retiring and people are just getting out of education. It’s just that we have an overflow of people getting out of education and not enough people to replace them.”
The shortages are hitting the core classes hardest. “If you look at OPI (Office of Public Instruction) and the job searches… English, math, history, and a lot of those core classes, there’s just not enough to replace the people moving or quitting.”
Schools are also facing an uphill fight filling support positions in addition to the difficulty hiring teachers. “Just like with anything else. We can’t find janitors, we can’t find bus drivers, we can’t find common people to come in and help. It’s everywhere. It’s hitting education really hard because you have to have licensed and certified people. A lot of people don’t want the burden of doing that.”
Schools have been forced to be creative in their efforts to draw new employees. Many schools are bringing teachers in at a higher starting pay as they work to entice educators to open positions. For our local district, this has involved a step higher starting rate. “What we do is, we have ways of increasing their pay by locking them in a step higher. Instead of step one, we bring them in at step 4. Then we have to keep them at that level until they’re tenured, and then they can start going up. It’s tough because you just cannot find teachers.”
Big Sandy typically tries to find teachers with local connections, as this tends to make them stay longer. Family connections or hometown jobs tend to dramatically increase the length a teacher stays. Fortunately, this year, 3 of the four positions were filled by people from the community. The Physical Education and part of the Math courses will now be taught by Melissa Han, who worked as a sub most of last year. “We have Maddie Jenkins coming on as English (another local). She’s married to a local boy. She taught in Rudyard last year, and she will be working in the English Department.”
“Stephanie Overbay will continue as the library aide. She’s not 100% certified, but at least we have somebody there if you want to check out a book.” Stephanie has been working as a teacher’s aid at FE Miley Elementary for several years. Last year, she filled in part of the year as the librarian, which she will continue to do this year.
The only teacher from outside of the Big Sandy Community will be filling the Math teacher position. “We needed to hire a math teacher, which we have that covered now. Frank Lenning is coming from Wisconsin. He’s been in Montana before. He moved back there to be closer to family for a while, now he’s taking on the math position.”
One of the more unusual elements of the search for teacher arose from the online job postings. “A lot of my applicants came from indeed.com. I went there and had one applicant from Montana, and the rest were from the Philippines. They’re looking for work, just like everyone else.”
