Nam Y. Huh/AP Photo
Students arrive for classes at Holmes Middle School in Wheeling, Illinois, October 21, 2020. The pandemic has magnified staffing issues, and Illinois has not produced enough educators or school administrators over the past decade to meet current needs.
Kyle Thompson, a regional state superintendent in East Central Illinois, plans to apply for a school bus driver’s license. He wants to get behind the wheel when regular drivers are out and demystify the ins and outs of the licensing process for potential hires. He’ll also get another perspective on the severe staff shortages in the seven rural counties he oversees. According to the Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents (IARSS) 2021 Educator Shortage Survey, 91 percent of schools in the region have reported declining numbers of teachers due to illnesses and resignations.
Omicron-induced shortages have reached crisis proportions across the country, especially in rural districts that were already experiencing staffing gaps before the pandemic. Two of Thompson’s rural school districts closed for several days in January. Other schools shut down for at least a day in the East Central Illinois counties of Champaign and Vermilion. Schools in North Texas were forced to close last month due to high numbers of student and teacher absences. In New Mexico, Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has gone so far as to call on state employees and National Guard members to get licensed so they can work as substitute teachers.
Read more about Education in America
It’s not only the bus driver and substitute teacher positions that go unfilled. School districts have trouble recruiting school psychologists, social workers, bilingual educators, and the special instructors who support students struggling to meet state academic standards. Teachers and administrators like Thompson must adapt to the unfamiliar terrain of the pandemic and respond to their students’ heightened social and emotional needs.
Kathi Griffin, president of the Illinois Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, was surprised at the extent of the closures. “I cannot remember another time in recent history when that’s been the case,” she said in a statement to the Prospect.
I’ve spent time over the last several months substitute teaching in the Charleston, Illinois, public schools, about three hours south of Chicago. One of those schools was Carl Sandburg Elementary, the school that I attended as a student. The full-time staff are exhausted. Reminding students, perhaps dozens of times each day, to pull up their masks, stay socially distanced, and sanitize their hands takes a toll on lesson plans and saps teachers’ energy. For students, transferring their trust to a revolving group of substitute teachers (when they can be found) is also challenging, particularly when they fear losing a beloved educator to COVID-19 and they are apprehensive about further disruptions.
The remaining teachers combine classes or skip planning periods and lunch hours to cover unstaffed classrooms. Administrators conduct home visits to check on students and their families and distribute food, winter clothes, and wireless internet hotspots. Parents step in to coordinate donation drives and provide translation services for non-English-speaking families.
Qualified candidates for these teaching positions are rare in rural and low-income communities.
The Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) has encouraged school districts to use federal pandemic relief funds to boost teacher and substitute pay, hire additional staff, and recruit parent mentors for classroom support. But qualified candidates for these positions are rare in rural and low-income communities, and educators and administrators consider ISBE “out of touch” with the needs of rural districts. “They don’t visit here. They don’t see what we’re going through and what we’re dealing with,” Thompson says.
Charleston, where the median income is about $41,000 and the poverty rate hovers at 30 percent, had a sharp drop-off in qualified teaching candidates even before the pandemic. When Chad Burgett served as principal of Carl Sandburg Elementary a decade ago, he had nearly 300 applicants for one first-grade teaching position. Now an assistant superintendent for business services in the district, Burgett says the school would be lucky to receive two applications for the same position today.
The pandemic has magnified staffing issues, but Illinois has simply not produced enough educators or school administrators over the past decade. In 2011, after the Illinois General Assembly tightened up the requirements for teacher licensure, student teachers decamped for positions in Indiana, where the process for obtaining credentials is less rigorous. Tuition rates in Illinois public universities have also doubled since 2006, a development that has discouraged teachers of color and people from low-income backgrounds from pursuing education and administration programs.
Political tensions further complicate recruitment and retention throughout the state. Last year, parents in Central and Southern Illinois filed a lawsuit against Gov. J.B. Pritzker and the ISBE over state-mandated COVID-19 mitigations in more than 140 school districts. In early February, Sangamon County Circuit Court Judge Raylene Grischow ruled in the parents’ favor, granting a temporary restraining order that effectively prohibits mask requirements in the districts named in the suit. Pritzker called the ruling misguided and announced that the state plans to appeal.
Illinois may have a tough battle ahead on that score. New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, California, and Oregon, states also led by Democratic governors, will lift indoor mask mandates for schools and other public spaces in coming weeks. Pritzker plans to lift indoor mask mandates for some spaces on February 28 but aims to maintain them in schools, hospitals, and prisons.
Not only have the politics of education polarized parents, they have also dissuaded qualified candidates from moving to certain areas of the state and contributed to the mass exodus of educators from the profession. Updated curricula, particularly expanded sex education standards, as well as the mask mandates and testing-or-vaccine requirements have led some educators to believe that they are being forced to teach against their “values,” as Thompson puts it. Others feel frustrated, or even endangered, by colleagues who hold opposing views.
To bolster recruitment and retention, rural Illinois school districts are strengthening communication with local union representatives, who are seeing new interest in union membership since the pandemic began. Districts are also recruiting out-of-state applicants and young Illinois residents through the Rural Schools Collaborative and Educators Rising, which focus on creating sustainable rural communities through work in K-12 schools.
Illinois education officials need to launch a slate of reforms beginning with a review and overhaul of teacher and specialized staff licensing and academic requirements. The state’s proposed fiscal 2023 budget increases funding for teacher scholarships and allocates up to $600 million to Monetary Award Program grants for Illinois low-income residents and students of color attending in-state colleges and universities—two more strong steps that would reverse the downward trajectory of the state’s rural schools.
