Can rural southern IL school districts find help within to solve teacher shortages?

There are teaching positions in kindergarten through 12th grade classrooms that have always been hard to fill: high school physics, calculus, special education, foreign language.

But in more rural districts, even positions that used to attract dozens of applicants, like elementary and physical education, aren’t attracting the interest they used to.

Positions that used to attract 30 applicants might only get one or two, Centralia High School Superintendent Chuck Lane said in a roundtable discussion of teacher shortages hosted by Golden Apple on May 20. Golden Apple is an Illinois organization focused on resolving the teacher shortage and diversifying the workforce.

“All of them are reporting the same thing,” said Regional Superintendent Julie Wollerman of the districts she oversees in Bond, Christian, Effinghman, Fayette and Montgomery Counties. “We’re running short in all areas.”

More than three-quarters of superintendents surveyed in the latest Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools study said they had a problem with teacher shortages; 86% said they thought the shortages would remain an issue for the next two years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Already, teacher retirements because of COVID-19 have hit Illinois schools hard. Last summer, there was an increase in “out of season” retirements as school districts started to announce their return-to-learn plans.

Between June and April, 3,899 teachers across the state retired, according to data from the Teachers Retirement System of Illinois. During that same period last year, 3,493 teachers retired.

In some rural parts of the state, importing talent is unlikely, said Alan Mather, President of Golden Apple. Instead, those communities need to find talent from within, he said.

Golden Apple Accelerators Program

Nikki Katich isn’t a teacher by trade. She has a bachelor’s degree in marketing and worked in the corporate world for a few years. But she hated every minute of it.

When she and her husband moved back to Gillespie, her hometown in Macoupin County, she said she got involved in her son’s school. She volunteered and was on an education foundation board when she was convinced by former teachers that she should try being a substitute teacher.

“I was subbing all the time and absolutely loved it, but there was never an opportunity to go back (to school) and do that,” she said. “As a wife, as a mom, it’s sometimes hard to go back to school, mid-life.”

Now working as a paraprofessional, the administration at Gillispie Middle School encouraged Katich to apply to the Golden Apple Accelerators program, an intensive year-long program to become certified to teach in Illinois.

Golden Apple first received $750,000 in funding from the state in 2019 and accepted 30 people who had bachelors degrees in southern, central and western Illinois to start the intensive licensure program. Those who complete the program start working in the fall and are obligated to stay with the school district for at least four years.

The program is virtual and provides students a stipend for tuition.

“It would have taken me two and a half to three years to go back to school. I couldn’t lose that time,” Katich said.

The cost was a barrier, too. She was focusing on saving for college for her son.

Turning experience into a credential

Most of the rest of the people in Katich’s cohort — the first for the Accelerators program — were in a similar situation: They were already working in a school. After an intensive three-week summer semester, accelerators have a semester of more coursework and classroom observation before student teaching in the spring.

“You’re not just walking into this blind,” Katich said. “I think that tends to keep me as a good candidate to be a teacher for a long time. I’m committed. I know what I’m getting myself into.”

Golden Apple partnered with two colleges — Blackburn College in Carlinville and Eastern Illinois University — for the coursework.

Blackburn College was already looking at creating an accelerated program to address the teacher shortage independently of the Golden Apples Accelerator program, said Michelle Stacy, a professor at the college. This year, Blackburn had 23 of the 30 Accelerators and six students who weren’t with Golden Apple and paid out of pocket.

All 29 candidates completed their coursework, and all but five have passed their content tests, Stacy said. The Illinois State Board of Education had an emergency rule because of COVID that allowed candidates to complete all coursework before taking the content tests. If that emergency rule is changed, Stacy said that would mean all future candidates would have taken their content tests by this point in the year.

“I think flexibility is the key,” Stacy said of what higher education could do to help the teacher shortage.

She said the candidates in the program have experience that translates well to the classroom, but often there isn’t a medium to let those people transfer that experience into a license, such as a special education aide wanting to become a teacher.

COVID-19 and four-year universities

During the course of the pandemic, teachers were both praised and lambasted in the court of public opinion. When schools first closed in March and parents tried their hand at a form of homeschooling, teachers were heralded as heroes. By fall, when many teachers unions across the country advocated that remote or hybrid learning continue rather than full in-person learning, they were deeply criticized for “not wanting to work.”

Susan Breck, assistant dean of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s School of Education, Health and Human Behavior, said that since education is a professional school that doesn’t start until the junior year, SIUE won’t know how COVID will affect interest and enrollment for two more years.

“We have no idea, quite frankly,” she said. “Anybody who decided to drop out of teaching because of COVID hasn’t started a program yet.”

To Breck’s knowledge, no one has left the program at SIUE because of COVID. She said it would be hard for someone already in the program to leave because, as a junior or senior, they’d basically have to start over.

For different reasons, both Breck and Mather suggested interest in teaching could go up after COVID. Mather pointed to the increase in new firefighters after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as well as the surge in nursing applications during the pandemic.

“During times of high unemployment, people have a tendency to go back to school and become teachers,” Breck said. “They think ‘we always need teachers.’”

Public school teachers in Illinois made an average of $65,721 in 2018, according to a report from the National Education Association. Between districts, though, there can be large discrepancies in average pay. In 2019, Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a bill into law that would require teachers to make at least $40,000 a year by 2023.

“It’s the same things we all say,” Breck said. “We need to pay teachers better. They need to have a better profile in public opinion. All those same things you hear.

“Quite frankly, it’s very difficult to attract people when they’re not going to be making a lot of money. But it’s paid by tax dollars and people don’t want their taxes to increase. … It’s on the backs of homeowners.”

What’s next?

After receiving $750,000 in its first year, $1.5 million was written into the state budget to expand the Golden Apple Accelerators program, but COVID-19 flattened the funding.

“As of right now, we are uncertain what’s going to happen with this next budget cycle,” Mather said.

The pilot program was entirely state-funded, but Mather said Golden Apple will ramp up fundraising efforts like they do for other programming. The goal is to expand the cohort size from 30 to 200.

“We are not the only solution (to the teacher shortage),” Mather said. “We’re one solution. We need lots of people working on this.”