Among things the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Teachers and Students should not debate is whether South Dakota has a teacher shortage. The mainstream media now speaks of the teacher shortage as a given, as evidenced in this KELO-TV report on schools posting and filling teaching positions sooner:
With fewer applicants, school districts are not wasting any time posting jobs or filling positions. At NSU’s education school, Carol Knecht says students are receiving offers about a month sooner than usual.
“We have faculty who have been here for 15 years and they’re all making the comment that this is a trend they haven’t seen in the past, that our candidates are signing their contracts so much earlier,” Knecht said.
Knecht says districts are also contacting her asking if there are any students she can send their way. She says the number of inquiries doubled in the last year.
“Their openings are kind of across the board, but I would say that we are centralized in some of the 7-12 positions,” Knecht said.
Michyl Miller is another spring NSU graduate who will benefit from the teacher shortage. She has a job waiting at Aberdeen Roncalli.
“It wasn’t really that difficult. There was a lot of openings right away so I applied immediately when I saw those positions open,” Miller said [Erich Schaffhauser, “Education Majors in High Demand,” KELOLand.com, 2015.04.23].
South Dakota is short on teachers. BluRTFTS can focus on figuring out how to end that shortage.
I can hear Whitey Wingnut now-we filled positions sooner than ever before which leads me to believe low teacher pay isn’t the problem. We can now push pay back until next year’s session while we study the problem some more.
The actual teacher openings today are over 450. If you look at the chart on KELO, that’s the top and off the chart.
The SD BOR has already concluded there is a teacher shortage. and the cause is low salaries (see last couple of pages (https://sdbor.edu/theboard/agenda/2015/April/29_BOR0415.pdf).
The Blue Ribbon Committee just needs to do a little reading.
Supply and demand are supposed to solve these problems, but with government they do not. They will just continue to run short of teachers. But they will hire lesser quality teachers so it will not look as bad. OH that has already happened.
I ate at the Lions Pancake supper Thursday evening. I met a family, a retired military couple who had two of their daughters with them. The youngest daughter (a recent graduate with a Masters degree) was teaching here in the Sioux Falls area. She was earning 15k less than she would be making in either Iowa or Minnesota. The older daughter who is married and has the sweetest little girl, is fluent in 6 languages and is commuting to a teaching job in Iowa. She is in a town of less than 10,000 people and earning 22,000 more than she can get here in SF. Sbe hates the commute, so will eventually face the choice to stay here and risk her life everyday driving to the other town or moving out of state the way so many of our teachers have.
County seats in both Yankton and Vermillion: how does that save money in a red moocher state?
Southern Dakota would simply cease to exist without handouts from federal entities like the US Department of Education.
Lanny, the Governor says the Blue Ribbon Task Force will only listen to hard data, not anecdotes. But I don’t know how the Blue Ribboners can ignore anecdotes like yours, and the hundreds of other stories just like that. Thank you for sharing that hard evidence of South Dakota’s teacher pay problem.