Amid a teacher shortage across Alaska and the Lower 48, the Haines Borough School District is struggling to fill vacancies.
For two months, the district hasn’t been able to hire a second-grade teacher and for over a month it has been trying to fill a high school science position. Administrators say they’ve never had so few applicants.
“We used to get tons (of applications) instantly, but not anymore,” said Ashley Sage, who has worked as a district administrator for 33 years. “For elementary especially, we’d get 30, 40, 50 of them fairly easily.”
Only one person from the U.S. has applied for the elementary job. The district has interviewed two people for the science opening but neither accepted an offer.
Sage said there was a precipitous decline in the number of applicants five years ago and that this year has been the worst yet.
As the number of U.S. applicants has dropped, the district has received more applications from abroad. Superintendent Roy Getchell said several applications for the second-grade opening have come from the Philippines.
Haines isn’t the only district in Alaska struggling to hire teachers and fielding applications from overseas. Most new hires this year in the Lower Kuskokwim School District were from the Philippines, according to news reports.
Getchell said he doesn’t want to revert to hiring foreign candidates yet because they need visas. “You’re guaranteed that they’re probably going to have to go home in three years,” he said.
A decade ago, Getchell said, “You would take 20, 30, 50 applications, screen it to seven, interview seven, and then you’d select. Now I can’t even get seven total applicants.”
Alaska’s education department last fall called the hiring and retention issue an emergency that “demands an exceptional response.” School districts across the country are reporting shortages in teachers and staff — a trend that began years ago and was exacerbated by the pandemic, which caused a “great resignation” across many industries, with former workers getting by on federal coronavirus aid or changing jobs for more flexibility and higher pay.
Last year one in four teachers nationwide was considering leaving their job before the end of the year, compared to one in six prior to the pandemic, according to a RAND Corporation survey.
“The thing that’s really going to impact students and their performance and school districts is putting the best people we can in front of them as a teacher, ” Getchell said. The Haines school district has employed about 30 teachers for the last 10 years, but fewer and fewer people have applied for vacancies.
What’s causing the shortage of candidates?
Getchell said one of the contributing factors is that Alaska’s retirement benefit program for teachers isn’t as strong as other states.
In 2006, Alaska ended its defined benefits pension plan for teachers in 2006 and now is one of only a few states without a program that guarantees retirees a monthly income proportional to their highest salaries while teaching.
The state now has a defined contribution system, which directs money from teachers’ salaries into a retirement account. That account is guaranteed after five years of teaching in Alaska, meaning a teacher could move but still receive the benefits accrued here.
“Right now the incentive is to leave after five years,” Getchell said. “Newly hired district employees, including teachers, are not eligible to contribute to Social Security either, so you have to move to one of the other 49 states and contribute to their system or to social security in order to have any sort of reliable income upon retirement.”
A bill currently moving through the state house would reestablish a defined benefit system option for public employees including teachers. Two bills likely to pass the house but uncertain in the senate would increase the state’s base student allocation, the amount multiplied by student numbers to determine how much state funding each district gets. That amount has stayed the same since 2017.
In a May 3 memo to the school board, Getchell said he expects some relief for schools this year but isn’t sure if it will be a one-time increase to the basic student allocation or only inflation proofing.
“We’ve been flat-funded for so long that districts can’t give the wages and benefits to be competitive,” said Tom Klaameyer, president of NEA-Alaska, a union that represents teachers across Alaska including in Haines.
Getchell similarly said flat funding “has contributed to Alaska’s standing at the top of the list in the country to move to the middle of the pack” and that the state is now competing with “international markets for a very limited number of teachers who in years past would have made Alaska their top destination.”
Klaameyer said he thinks the situation will keep getting worse until the state better funds education and reforms the retirement benefits system.
Haines third-grade teacher and president of the local NEA chapter Kristin White said “low salaries, the five-year cap on experience that is considered when you’re new to the district, the number of steps on the salary scale, limited opportunities for career growth, and our remote location—with limited housing options—play into what is, as mentioned, a problem with recruiting certified staff across the United States.”
Of the 54 school districts in Alaska, Haines teachers are among the lowest paid, the CVN reported last fall. In 2015, the teachers’ union and the school board agreed to lower the top salary and raise the starting salary to try to increase recruitment. But hiring has only gotten harder.
Getchell said another cause of the shortage is that a lot of teachers retired or left the profession during the pandemic. “Nobody’s job is getting easier. But this is a tough time for our profession,” Getchell said, referring to the politicization of education issues. “The pandemic really highlighted that. We’ve done well here, but a lot of places didn’t.”
State economists found that across all industries in Alaska the majority of people who dropped out of the workforce during the pandemic were 60 or older.
Mark Fontenot, who retired last year after 26 years as Haines High’s science teacher, said he made the decision to leave in large part because he didn’t enjoy teaching during the pandemic.
“I didn’t feel like I could do my job well. I’m the science teacher. Things like virtual labs and simulations—it felt like a shell of what it should’ve been,” Fontenot said. “Also I had recently married and met the love of my life, and we would be able to travel and be free and have adventures while I was still young enough to enjoy those.”
Former Haines principal Rene Martin, who left in 2020, said until 2016 or 2017 the school usually had at least three highly qualified candidates to choose from for each opening. Then numbers began to thin, she said, but “we would still get that gem.”
Martin moved to central Michigan, where she’s still a principal. Her school started the year with eight vacant positions. “We can’t even get applications down here,” she said.
Like Getchell, Martin cited the politicization of education and “negative energy towards” teachers and administrators. Last year, she said, she was accused by a parent of murdering children because her school, following county health guidelines, had a hybrid masking policy instead of a universal one. (She said no students died due to the policy.)
“The big thing is just to support your teachers,” Martin said. “When you have a question about what’s happening in the school or classroom, call the school or the teacher. Get the answer from the source first.”
Getchell said Haines is “fortunate” because it hasn’t been hit by the shortage as hard as other places.
The Wrangell schools superintendent recently said staffing shortages there could cause the district to consider a shift to distance learning, according to a Wrangell Sentinel report.
Getchell said Southeast is generally considered a desirable location for teachers in Alaska, and Haines especially, among rural towns, because it’s “a great community that is also on the road system.”
The school board last week approved the hirings of an assistant principal, a high school math teacher and extended the contract of the school’s mental health counselor. But the elementary teacher and high school science teacher positions remain unfilled.
“What’s frightening is that I think today might be good compared to a year from now, two years, three years — unless the trend changes,” Getchell said.